Start playing a video and click on the icon and you’ll see one or more listings for the video. Once you’ve installed the extension, a DownloadHelper icon appears in Firefox’s address bar at the top of the browser window, or in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window (we found different behavior on different Macs). Speaking of Firefox, its users have a better option thanks to the freeĭownloadHelper extension. For those files, turn to Firefox or a third-party tool. Unfortunately, you can’t download MPEG-4 files using this method. As mentioned earlier, you can then play this file with a third-party tool.

Option-double-click on it and it will download to your Mac as an flv file. In the list of links below look for an entry of several megabytes that appears to be loading. In this window you’ll see the name of the video followed by the word YouTube. Press Command-Option-A to produce Safari’s Activity window. For example, navigate to a YouTube video you want to capture and start it playing. If you’re using Safari you’ll find that there’s no obvious command for capturing streaming YouTube videos, but it can be done with the browser’s built-in tools provided that you’re downloading a Flash file. Easy or difficult, it’s possible to capture just about any video on the Web. Perian plug-in), you must convert these to a format compatible with iOS devices. VideoLAN client (or in QuickTime Player if you’ve installed the While you can play these videos in a browser or with a third-party application such as the However, many websites continue to offer videos encoded in the Flash (flv) format. For example, it’s fairly easy to download MPEG-4-encoded content and play those videos on your Mac and iOS devices because MPEG-4 is natively supported on these devices.

Capturing Web video can be a one- or multi-step process, depending on how the original content is encoded and protected.

Youtube downloader firefox