Added the below info to the Free Video page, so figured I should add a post about it too since it’s some very useful info.
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Another nice little tool recently discovered from an anonymous little birdie that recently sent me a message:
http://keepvid.com/
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TOOLS for getting videos in to your local storage for use with Media players, etc.
Video Cache View is awesome. It shows you the ‘cache’ your browser(s) use to store video files. This is very useful since those are bits and pieces of videos you viewed online that your browser saved on your computer already – no downloading of video is necessary since it’s already been downloaded. This gizmo just helps you figure out ‘where’ it was saved to already by the browser… Usually on my computer the individual files end up being about 6 or 7 minutes long for most video sites. It saves like 7 minutes in one file, then a new file will be another 7 minutes if the video in question is 14 minutes long, etc…
Download Youtube Videos as MP4 is also useful but it only works for Youtube, not other video sites…
Fast Video Download add on for Firefox is similar to the Video Cache View, but it only is useful for a limited number of files that were recently viewed, so it’s usefulness isn’t quite as great as the Video Cache View, but for short videos it’s a great option.
Once you have all of the pieces of the puzzle, you need to put them together, but first you need to possibly edit them, etc. These cached videos are typically mp4 or flv files (but won’t necessarily be named with those file extensions at first).
To edit file start/end spots, etc. FLV EDITOR LITE is fantastic. It’s definitely not ‘Adobe Premiere’ quality, but it’s close enough for just splicing start and end times on flv files. I think it even allows you to put up to 4 flvs together in to one file, etc. I have not tested it a lot with multiple file editing, but you could probably piece together 4 videos, and then export that as one video, then add another 3 to the combined and so on and so forth? I might have to try that sometime… Right now I mainly just use it to edit start/end times on individual files and use other software to piece the parts back together.
That ‘other’ software is Free Video Joiner. It allows you to add flv and mp4 files together and save them out as one file that is joined… I’ll warn you though Free Video Joiner uses a LOT of cpu power so using it might cause the fans on your computer to get a little louder as they try to compensate for the heat all that computation cpu power that joining video files uses.
Also, MP4 Joiner sometimes can be fairly handy and fast. Both MP4 Joiner and FLV Editor Lite are very quick since they don’t seem to have to re-encode.
There are other free software applications out there, but these are the few I’ve found extremely useful for getting online videos I uploaded in the past that were deleted from hard drive or never backed up locally back in to one piece, etc.
Jeff Thomann's Blog 