How to download streaming videos

More and more people are hooked on watching streaming movies and videos. And a lot of people certainly want to know how to download these videos they see online.

Downloading videos is quite easy if the download links are provided. You just point and click your mouse to it and the process begins. However, there are cases, when these links are not given. Well, I have a few tips that can help you with this.

One way would be to use Firefox browser and install its plug in called Download Helper.

Firefox is a well known browser that offers a lot of useful plugins, extension and even themes. Download Helper is one of them.

DownloadHelper is a free Firefox extension for downloading videos and images from many sites with minimum effort. You can save videos from sites where there is no option to download the movie to your hard disk. It is also possible to capture all the images from a gallery in a single operation.

After you successfully installed Download Helper to your Firefox browser, you would see a small icon on your browser tool bar, which rotates whenever there is a video or file that is downloadable. When it’s rotating, a small arrow on the side appears and you have to click on it to see the file name (not exactly the title of the video). Again, click on the file name and a pop up window will prompt you about if you want to download the file. Before clicking OK, check first where you want to save the file.

* If the Download Helper didn’t show up on your Firefox toolbar, go to your browser VIEW -> TOOLBAR -> CUSTOMIZE and drag the Download Helper icon to your toolbar.

* When you are on the page where the video is streaming and the Download Helper icon starts rotating, click on the arrow beside the Download Helper icon and it will show a drop down list of the items you can download.

* choose one that shows flash file (.flv) but you have to press CTRL key while selecting. The actual URL of the file is then copied to the clipboard.

* open Free Download Manager and this actual URL appears as the URL to download. All I do is add (by typing) .flv to the end of the actual URL (because if you don’t, it will download as an index file and not the video.

* pls note that the ‘actual URL’ for downloading the video is not the same as the page URL.

* Once you initiated the download process, then you can do other stuff, close browser, surf to other sites and your download still continues.

NOTE: Download Helper supports numerous video sites however, there are still a few that are not supported. For a list of video sites, click on the Download Helper icon itself.

More information on http://www.downloadhelper.net/
other sources: http://myvideolinks.110mb.com