One thing I do on a daily basis is snag videos I find online to carry with me on my digital media player (DMP). Usually it’s just weather reports from my local CBS affiliate or highlights from Dodger games but every now and then I find a video that I just have to put on my DMP. It may be a videosong from Pomplamoose or a Tiny Desk Concert from NPR, or it may just be a cool or humorous video I’ve come across in my browsing. I used to use a very nice extension for GNOME’s Epiphany browser but when I switched to using Chromium there were a couple of add-ons I could use to snag YouTube videos. Then of course YouTube got wise to us and changed the layout of their website to break the downloaders. The Minitube devs were able to get a fix implemented to let us enjoy videos outside of our web browsers, and we can get a URI from Minitube to use to download the video, but that gets kind of convoluted.
About a month ago I found out about a program called ClipGrab, that lets people running Linux, Windows or the MacOS save and convert online videos so easily it’s almost indecent. I found about it through OMG! Ubuntu’s Facebook feed.
I didn’t blog about it sooner because I wanted to hold off on blogging it until I had a chance to use it more before I wrote what might be an incomplete review. It’s not a perfect solution because I can’t use it to snag my local weather reports or MLB highlights, nor can I use it to snag Facebook vids or clips for NBC shows, like one I’d love to be able to snag.
To install it you can download installers for OpenSUSE, Windows Vista and XP, and the MacOS from the ClipGrab download page, plus they have source code for the three platforms. The ClipGrab team has also set up a PPA for Ubuntu users, which is how I installed it on Mint. (And yes, it works beautifully under KDE, as my screencaps show.) The instructions for adding it to your software sources is in the OMG! Ubuntu! article.
Once you have ClipGrab installed simply launch it. If you’ve already copied the URI for the page a video you want to download can be found you can simply paste it into the text box below the blue bar but if you launch ClipGrab before copying the URI the software make it even easier for you. Let’s say you want to snag the video about a fan of the progrock band Yes who tries to turn one person onto the band only to find his entire campus is becoming Yes fans. Copy the URI from the address bar and you’ll get a notification pop-up from the ClipGrab icon in your system tray.
Simply click on that icon and ClipGrab will load that URI into it’s location field and get the name of the video and what levels of quality it’s available in. Select the format you want to save it as and the quality level you want and click Grab this clip! A file picker window will open to let you specify where you want it saved and what name you want it saved as. You don’t have to specify the extension as ClipGrab will add that automatically. If you add it yourself you will end up with two extensions, such as All Good People.mp4.mp4. Whoops!
ClipGrab version 3.0.7.2 supports videos on YouTube, Clipfish, Collegehumor, Dailymotion, and five other sites (the complete list is on the About ClipGrab page), but it may be able to snag a video from other sites as well. Simply give the URI to ClipGrab and see if it can recognize how to get the video. It can also download HD videos from sites that support high definition videos, so you may be able to use it on more sites than you realize.
For saving the videos ClipGrab supports not only MPEG4 and WMV video formats, but it can also save Ogg Theora videos, Ogg Vorbis audio files and MP3 files.
Thanks to the good folks over at OMG! Ubuntu! for letting me know about this very cool application.
Filed under: GNU/Linux, KDE, Linux Mint, Open Source, Tech, Ubuntu/Kubuntu Tagged: download, MacOS, OSX, PPA, video, Vista, Windows, XP, Youtube
