The Noble Lie

EDIT: This plugin, which was once called VideoDownloader, is now called DownloadHelper. You may need to create an account on Mozilla's site to download the plugin, unfortunately.

It's becoming clear that the days of sites like this are becoming numbered. I will dig up links later, but two stories have come to light that should be pretty easy to find, and very telling. First, Australia is on the verge of implementing nation-wide mandatory internet filtering, and not surprisingly, that includes "questionable content." Second, Microsoft is working on, or just acquired, a patent for software that censors video content while the video is playing, automatically recognizing swear words and scrambling the offending language into babble. The articles practically brag that this will also be used to target and sanitize "questionable content."

This means, if you see a good documentary or video on one of the big video-sharing sites, save it. It may not be there tomorrow.

If you already have the know-how, I would start grabbing every video you want to keep. I've already had a few news stories (like the one about catching rain water being illegal) disappear. The internet curtain will come down, I fear, as will the DRM curtain. So grab while the grabbing is good. If you don't know how to download videos off sites like YouTube, Google Video, and so on, I recommend using the Firefox web browser (available on all platforms) and installing the VideoDownloader plugin.

When the video is playing, you will see the icon in your Navigation Toolbar light up and start dancing.

When you click on the arrow to the right of the dancing icon, you get a list of the video(s) that are available on the page. Select one and save it to your hard drive. It’s best to look for the files that end in .mp4 as those are usually the higher-quality versions, but files that end in .flv will work just fine.

One last step.. .flv and .mp4 files are both not playable in Windows Media Player by default. You have two options to get around this, and both of them are easy. If you use Macintosh or Linux, chances are you can already watch these files.

Your first option is to download and install a decent Codec pack for Windows Media Player. Codec is short for coder-decoder, which is a nerdy way of saying it has all the information that Windows Media Player needs to play the file format in question. The Codec pack that I recommend for easy installation and minimum headaches is the K-Lite Codec Pack.

If you aren’t a fan of Windows Media Player, you can instead use the small, fast, portable VLC Media Player, which can handle almost any format you can think of to throw at it.

Links recap

• Firefox web browser
• VideoDownloader plugin for Firefox
• K-Lite Codec Pack
• VLC Media Player