The popularity of YouTube, Google Video and other "Flash" based video sites now means there are literally millions of great video clips viewable on the net. However, downloading these videos or watching them offline either requires special players and codecs, that's if you manage to download them in the first place.

This guide will show you how to download the video from sites like YouTube and Google Video, how to playback these file and if you want to, convert them to the more universal AVI/DivX format - all using freeware tools!

Software you'll need:

• Mozilla FireFox
  
• Google Video Player
  
• Media Player Classic
  
• ffdshow
  
• Dr. DivX

Step 1.1: Downloading the video using UnPlug

This step is mainly for YouTube videos, since Google video provides it's own downloader program (Google Video Player). If the Google Video does not offer downloads, then the following steps will work as well. For Google video that are available to download, please skip to step 1.2.



You need to first download and install the Mozilla FireFox browser. Once it is installed, start FireFox and within it, go to this address: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2254/. Scroll down the page and find the "Install Now" link and click on it.



You will need to restart FireFox now to enable the plugin.

Now go to the YouTube/Google Video page that contains the video (in FireFox, of course). From the FireFox "Tools" menu, select "UnPlug" and you should be redirected to the UnPlug page where the download link for the video is.





The one where the type is "Flash Video Data" is the one you want (hence the "(this is probably the one you want)" text on the page). Click on the "Save" image and save the FLV file (usually titled "get_video.flv" - you can rename it to anything, as long as you keep the ".flv" at the end).



You have now downloaded the video (in FLV format) to your hard-drive. Skip step 1.2 and go straight to step 2: playing back the FLV file.

Step 1.2: Downloading Google video using Google Video Player

Lots of Google videos now offer downloads, done through Google's Video Player. The player saves the Google video in the GVI format, which is actually the same as AVI. If Google does not offer you the download button, then you need to go back to the previous step (step 1.1: Downloading the video using UnPlug).



First, download and install Google Video Player.

Next, go to the Google video page that contains the video you want to download and locate the "Download" button (see screenshot above). The drop down menu next to the download button has two options. The "Windows/Mac" option saves the video in GVI format (again, same as AVI) that uses MPEG-4 ASP (similar to DivX/XviD) for video and Lame MP3 for audio. The "Video iPod/Sony PSP" option saves the video in MP4 using H.264 for video and AAC LC for audio. This guide will cover the "Windows/Mac" option (GVI), although you can download it in MP4 format if you wish and refer to our MP4 Usage Guide for further instructions on how to play/convert this format.

Anyway, select the "Windows/Mac" option and click on the "Download" button. This will hopefully start the Google Video Player (if it doesn't start, you might need to restart your browser). The Video will start to stream/play, and at the same time, Google Video Player will be saving the video to your hard drive - the default save directory is "My Documents\My Videos\Google Videos" (you can change this in the "File" -> "Preferences" window). Once the video has streamed fully, the GVI file should now be saved to your hard-drive.



You can now rename the file extension to "AVI" and it will be a perfectly playable AVI file. If you can't see the ".gvi" extension (and hence, can't change it to ".avi"), you will need enable it in Windows by going into Tools -> Folder Options -> View and deselecting the "Hide extension for known file types" option" - see this image for more details.

And you're now finished with this guide, so you can skip the rest of the steps (lucky you).

Step 2: Playing back the FLV file

You can skip to "Step 3: Converting FLV files to DivX (AVI)" if you don't wish to playback the FLV file and only want to convert it to AVI/DivX.

We can use Media Player Classic and ffdshow to playback FLV files. Media Player Classic has built in FLV playback (FLV4 format), but some FLV files are in FLV1 format and you will need ffdshow to play these files back.

The following "Installing MPC" and "Installing ffdshow" sections assume you don't have ffdshow installed and you don't plan on using ffdshow + MPC for anything other than FLV playback.

Installing MPC:

1. Download the MPC version that is suitable for your operating system
   
2. MPC is really just a single executable, so extract the .exe file to any directory you wish (eg. c:\Program Files\Media Player Classic\)
   
3. Click on the .exe file to start MPC. Easy.

Installing ffdshow:

1. Download ffdshow and start the installation. Click "Next" until you get to the "Select Components" screen, and make sure you select the "VFW interface" option. Press "Next" to continue.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. When you reach the "Select Additional Tasks" screen, it will now allow you to select which codecs ffdshow will decode for you (if you already have ffdshow installed, the current selected decoders will be shown). Select the "FLV1", "VP5/VP6" settings for video and "MP3" for audio.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Press "Next" and then "Install" to start the installation. Once it is done, the follow screen will appear. Select the options as shown below (run video and VFW decoder configuration) and press "Finish" to complete the install.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. The "ffdshow video decoder configuration" and "ffdshow video encoder configuration" windows should now have opened up (check the titles of the windows to tell which is which). In the "ffdshow video decoder configuration" program, select "Codecs" on the left hand side, make sure the "libavcodec" option is selected for both "VP6F" and "FLV1" as shown below and then press "Apply" (if clickable) and then "OK" to close this window. This should now allow you to playback the extracted AVI file in most multimedia/Directshow players.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. In the "ffdshow video encoder configuration" window, click on the "Decoder" tab and select "Codecs" on the left hand side.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. Again, make sure the "libavcodec" option is selected for both "VP6F" and "FLV1", press "Apply" and then "OK" to close this window. This is not actually needed for playback in Directshow players, but this will allow you to load AVI files with the FLV1/FLV4 codec in encoding tools like VirtualDub(Mod).

Associating .flv files with MPC:

1. Right click on the ".flv" you are using for this test. From the menu that opens, select the "Open With -> Choose Program" option, or if it isn't there, select "Open".
   
2. Click on "Browse" and locate your MPC .exe file (eg. c:\Program Files\Media Player Classic\mplayerc.exe). Select the "Always use the selected program ..." option if you want to make the association permanent. Press "OK" to close the window.
   

Your ".flv" file should now be opened in MPC and hopefully, it should start playing with video and audio.

You can now use Media Player Classic to play FLV files.



If you want to convert the FLV file to a more common format like DivX (for use in video editing, DVD burning ...), then please continue.

Step 3: Converting FLV files to DivX (AVI)

This step will allow you to convert the FLV file to an AVI/DivX file using Dr. DivX. Dr. DivX was chosen to be used in this guide because it supports opening FLV files and can convert to DivX with little fuss. However, it does not support FLV4 files (eg. those used by Metacafe) and there is now a more comprehensive guide on FLV to AVI conversion that allows you greater control over the conversion process (including the support for FLV4 files and ther ability to convert to XviD) - it's slightly more difficult than the method listed below, but if you're interested or have FLV4 files (you'll get an error in Dr. DivX saying "the file is not decodable"), please head on to our FLV to AVI Conversion Guide.

Download and install Dr. DivX (assuming you have already installed the DivX codec). Start Dr. DivX and you should see this screen:



Click on the "Open" button next to the "Input file(s)" box and load in your FLV file. You might have to change the "Files of type" setting to "All Files" to be able to see the FLV file. Alternatively, you can drag and drop the FLV file into the "Input file(s)" box.

On the right hand side, enter a file name under the "Title" section and click on the "..." button to the right to select the output directory.



There are lots of option to configure, especially in the "Advanced" section (please refer to the DivX 6 Setup Guide for more information on these advanced settings), but for the purpose of this tutorial, simply select one of the "DivX Profiles" (High Definition, Home Theatre, Portable and Handheld) that suits what you plan to do with the file. You can also select a "Quality" setting (the software will try to encode a video to this quality, but the file size might not be predictable), or alternatively limit the output file to a certain size.



When you are done, press the "Encode" button and the current encoding will be added to the job queue.



Press the "Resume" button to start the encoding and after a short while, you should now have a ".divx" file. You can change this ".divx" file to ".avi" to make it into an AVI file (if you cannot see the file extension, you can enable it in Windows by going into Tools -> Folder Options -> View and deselecting the "Hide extension for known file types" option" - see this image for more details).

Now that the file is in AVI format, you can now convert it to many other types of files much more easily. You can even re-encode the file to XviD if you wish using AutoGK.

And we're done