The bandwidth consumed by YouTube alone today is equal to the bandwidth consumed by the whole of the Internet in 1995. That surely gives you some idea of the revolution YouTube has brought about in cyber space.
You often come across videos on YouTube, Google Videos etc. which you wish you could download and save on your PC instead of streaming it online whenever you wanted to see them.
A FireFox extension called VideoDownloader lets you do just that. The extension installs itself as a small icon on your browser’s status bar. Whenever you wish to save a video, just search YouTube, find the video and open it. Next, click on the VideoDownloader icon. The extension would automatically locate the video’s path and offer downloads in various formats, which include .FLV (Flash Video) and .AVI
Be prepared that the downloads will be hefty and the site may not support download accelerators or resume functions. (No, don’t get excited. The video quality won’t be much better either.) In case you choose to download in the FLV format, you need to download another software called the FLV player (You can get it from www.download.com, the Godfather of all download sites.). As an alternative, you could also download a neat piece of software called Replay Converter using which you can convert your FLV files into AVI and other widely accepted formats and play them in your regular media players.
Now that was all about video. There are also plenty of tools to rip streaming audio off the web, and save them as an MP3 file. (If this is legal to do so is still a matter of discussion). Obviously, it would be foolish to expect great bit-rates, though the sound quality is definitely hearable. I have been ripping a lot of audio from online radio websites (Good ones include Pandora*, Last.FM and Smashits.com), and the main tool in my inventory is called TotalRecorder. (A quick survey on ripping software reveals that the popular software Audacity is also one among them). A quick tip while you rip – Make sure you mute the microphone before you start ripping. Secondly, ensure that you set your software to ignore mute gaps, incase the audio starts to buffer while you are recording.
Talking about FireFox extensions, there are plenty of them available. But the ones I personally use and recommend are DownThemAll!, IE Tab, McAfee Site Advisor and PDF Download.