Job Discussion Forums

[choudoufu]

as we all know, thanks to senator ted, "the internet is not a big truck, it's
a series of tubes." furthermore, those tubes taken jointly, or in conjunction
with one large joint, come together to form what has been called, on more
than one occasion by the esteemed incurious george, "the internets."

as we all know, every side has two coins. whereas the tubes of your
internets may be flowing quite harmoniously, the tubes on the other hand
of the vast internets on my side have become negatively ionized.

i love the tubes of the internets. my most favorite tube of all is the youtubes.
recently though, the youtubes of the internets is a big truck. a big, broken
down truck. i prefer to use the RealDownLoader when i summon the youtubes
in order that i may load down bits of the moving pictures talkies for the
enlightenment of my student bodies.

before recently, the stuff that i would load down are stored in my electronic
brain in Flash Video format. at about that same point in time when
the load downs were loaded down, they would be stored in MPEG-4 format.
doesn't matter what form they were in inside the youtubes; now
everything gets loaded down as MPEG-4, and cannot be viewed either
on the RealPlayer or the windows MediaPlayer.

does there exist anyone out there on the other side of the interwebs that
knows how to solve this problem?

[kungfuman]

I found that the only real playa on the block was the VLC player. Has options to find codecs and seems more reliable than the other two mentioned.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

and the freemakevideodownloader also seems to save the Utube vids better than others.

http://www.freemake.com/downloads/

[Zimmer]

You can download a program that will convert the format to something compatible with your media player. I use one called any video converter but there are probably lots of them out there.

[choudoufu]

have you used either of them in the past week or so? youtube recently
made some changes, maybe due to google's purchase of their tubes, or
possibly because the nsa demanded it.

anyway, the interwebs is currently all atwitter. realplayer techs say
they're "on it," and should have a fix shortly, but they been saying
that for a month at least.

i can download, i get a huge file. it's propertied as mpeg-4 but is unplayable
as a corrupt file. real mpeg-4's will play with no problems.

so. have you used those two recently?

[kungfuman]

^ yeah click on the free make link

[kungfuman]

[choudoufu]

thank you ever so. i shall try it tonight.

*******************

looked into downloading freemake, but it requires framework.net or
somesuch to be added to XP. i'd rather not molest the operating system.

instead went with "1-click youtube video download" from the add-ons
on mozilla's intertubestation.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1-click-youtube-video-download/

my tubes are better now, downloading as flash video. hooray.

[fluffyhamster]

FWIW (in reply to not only the OP, but anyone else who might be looking for good downloaders): The problem I've found with RealPlayer is that any MP4s it downloads will then not be playable in WMP (which seems the default player for that type of file), or even in more versatile players such as the VLC mentioned by a previous poster. It'd be best then to install a more dependable (and RP also crashes a lot, esp. in Chrome!) and versatile downloader. The following, which is another Firefox add-on, works very well and is regularly updated, and allows you to select a variety of formats, as well as convert between them at the time of download, or offline later:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/?src=cb-dl-mostpopular

The one specific drawback though with this add-on is that MP3 download or conversion isn't free. (I really must check out e.g. the YT MP3 Podcaster!). And the conversions it does allow end up with a top-left watermark in the free version.

Then, the general drawback to using these FF add-ons is that FF is quite a memory-hungry browser and gets quite slow sometimes, so the Ant player add-on, which has a version for not just FF but IE too (visit their actual site rather than just the Mozilla pages), is worth checking out. For Chrome, there only seems to be RP.

Edit: I'm not sure how the latest version of that first add-on will function with XP (I switched to Windows 7 last year), but the version a year ago worked fine.

[kungfuman]

[Albert Cribbins]

Search the firefox addons, they work in browser, and let you save as a .mp4, at least the one I use does. The resultant file can be copied and played on smartphone or tablet.