Greasemonkeying with Google Video and YouTube

One of the frustrating things about websites that use Flash video is that they rarely provide links to let you download the video files for offline viewing or transcoding/syncing to portable devices like the Sony PSP, video iPod, or Creative Zen Vision.

Case and point: Google Video and YouTube. Neither of these websites allow you to download the video files. This type of lock-down is soooo Web 1.0.

I decided to dive into Greasemonkey and create a couple scripts to expose download links on Google Video and YouTube webpages:

Google Video Getter
YouTube To Me

To install these scripts you will need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. After installing Greasemonkey, relaunch Firefox, then right-click the links above and select "Install User Script." Now whenever you browse to a Google Video or YouTube webpage, you will see a prominent download link at the top.

Welcome to Web 2.0 where the user is in control of the experience.

Posted by: t. Cooke at January 1, 2006 07:49 PM

Make sure you save these files with a .flv extension. You can simply change the .php extension to .flv.

Also, you will need an FLV player to view these videos. Here's a free one:
http://www.martijndevisser.com/2005/10/flv_player_updated.html

Lastly, you may want to convert these videos to a different format for editing/remixing. Here is a video converter that can handle FLV and transcode to other video formats:
http://www.effectmatrix.com/total-video-converter/

Posted by: John at January 8, 2006 08:53 AM

Great extension.
Here is a guide to convert .flv (flash video) to .avi or .mpg:
http://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=259578

And a batch converting tool:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=104183

sandbox films: Greasemonkeying with Google Video and YouTube