Downloading video from the net?

[mikehende]

You're absolutely right, I opened VLC and the entire file played right through and the quality is superb, thank you very much! Only thing is, I can't rmember downloading that particular video so I will go experiment now and get back to you guys tomorow, please check back here, thnaks.

[mikehende]

Ok, Keepvid is doing it now, any ideas on how I can convert this flv file to either avi or dvd format?

[dphirschler]

Does "Directshowsource" work (for playing flv files) in AviSynth? If you can get it into an AviSynth script, then you can feed that to an mpeg encoder.


Darryl

[Ai Haibara]

One thing you can try, since you have VLC available, is to try its transcoding abilities. (Note that I don't normally use VLC to transcode, so I can't comment on how well it works.) Open the file you want to convert in VLC, then pick Wizard from the File menu (or hit Ctrl-W). In the window that pops up, pick Transcode/Save to file, and you'll be given a number of output choices.

ffmpeg and mencoder (or a GUI which uses them, like SUPER), can also convert FLVs, but only if they use the FLV codec (not VP6 or anything else).

[mikehende]

First, tell me this guys, would converting the flv files to avi or whatever, show any better than in it's flv state? Reason I'm asking is becuase if there is nothign I can do to get those videos to show any better then I might as well leave them as they are on my pc and show them via VLC as opposed to burning them to DVD, what's your thoughts on this?

[Ai Haibara]

You won't be able to make the videos look much better than how it presently appears in the source FLV. You can run it through a few filters to make it look a little better to you, subjectively, such as blurring some of the jagged edges (from lo-res encoding), if you prefer, but that won't really help the quality by much. Then again, showing the videos on a regular CRT TV might do the same thing.

I should also note that when you transcode a video to another format, you're usually reencoding it, losing a little more of the quality in the process.

[mikehende]

That being the case, I might as well be thankful for whatever I can get and leave it at that and use VLC to playback the videos, alright, that's settled then, really appreciate all of the help from all of you guys with this, one more thing on this topic please, aside from Youtube, are there any other sites just as good?

[mikehende]

Another thing I can use help with guys, how can I get the saved flv video files to play one after another from my hard drive? I don't want to have to keep clicking one after another all day, any ideas?

[BJ_M]

join them together with the dos command line syntax

copy /B fileA.flv+fileB.flv+fileC.flv newfile.flv

[Ai Haibara]

You can use VLC's playlist ability. For example, select Playlist under the View menu (or hit Ctrl-P). Then, under the Manage menu in the Playlist window, pick Add Directory, choose the directory with the videos you want to play (repeat if necessary ), then go back to the main VLC window and press Play.

As for other video services... hmm. I haven't really looked at many of them. I know there's Google Video and Guba... There's a number of others listed on keepvid.com's main page under the "Download direct from most video sites" heading, but I haven't checked any of them.

[mikehende]

Which is the best way for me to back up the videos I got from Youtube? Nero doesn't accept these files so I can't burn the files to dvd for backup purposes, any ideas?

[DarrellS]

Riva Flash Player

http://www.rivavx.com/index.php?id=422&L=3

Wow, I finally got keepvid to work.
I didn't see the save as/download link below everything. I kept hitting the download button and wondered why nothing ever happened.
Bummer, I missed out on alot of good clips that I couldn't download. Now I'll have to go searching and see if I can find em' and get them to work. They weren't from youtube.

[DarrellS]

Which is the best way for me to back up the videos I got from Youtube? Nero doesn't accept these files so I can't burn the files to dvd for backup purposes, any ideas?

There is the other dilemna. Maybe you'll have better luck at trying to convert to avi than I did.
The older files will convert with Super or other programs that users have mentioned but I can't get the new files to convert with anything.

If you can get them to play at a decent frame size, then you can use a screen capture program to capture and save as AVI. This seems to be the best way I've found.
No error messages from refusing to convert or half converted files or files with no sound with Super.

[Jeremiah58]

Which is the best way for me to back up the videos I got from Youtube? Nero doesn't accept these files so I can't burn the files to dvd for backup purposes, any ideas?

Of course you can burn them to DVD using Nero.
Just use the option DVD-ROM (ISO) and not the DVD-Video.

[choirislife923]

if it's streaming media, the easiest way i found is to get URL Snooper (http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/urlsnooper/) to find the streaming media URL, then load the URL into HiDownload (http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/HiDownload/1025449896/1) to download it. That way, you get a bit-for-bit copy of the file on the server; no funky screen capture methods.

[gilera]

On a slightly different capture query. Does anyone know of a programme that will allow you to capture the video that is running in VLC player into an AVI file?

[Ai Haibara]

On a slightly different capture query. Does anyone know of a programme that will allow you to capture the video that is running in VLC player into an AVI file?

As I mentioned above (see the fourth post from the top on this page), you can try VLC's own transcoding abilities to export to an AVI.

[Ai Haibara]

Which is the best way for me to back up the videos I got from Youtube? Nero doesn't accept these files so I can't burn the files to dvd for backup purposes, any ideas?

Of course you can burn them to DVD using Nero.
Just use the option DVD-ROM (ISO) and not the DVD-Video.

Yeah, you can burn them all to a data DVD (or CD), and if you prefer, you can even use it as the source for all your videos in VLC. Just point VLC toward the disc when making your playlist.

[gilera]

Thanks for that info Ai Haibara, just what i want.

[mikehende]

Thanks guys, got it done!

[mikehende]

The last thing I have to look into now with this the matter of "volume normalizing". I am being told that MPC does this really good but as far as I know MPC does not support flv files? Does VLC have an option to play all videos at the same volume? If not then my only other option would be to convert the flv files to some format which MPC supports, will I lose quality doing this conversion? Or is there a better flv player which will take care of the volume issues, what would "you" guys do in this situation?

[mikehende]

Alright, I have switched to MPC but I am having one problem concerning importing of the files I have downloaded from Youtube, of the many files I have downloaded from there, only 4 files show the extension .flv and these are the only 4 files which are importing into MPC, funny thing is, all of the downloaded files except for these 4 don't show any extension, all it reads is "file", any ideas what's going on here please?

[Ai Haibara]

Try giving all the files from YouTube the extension of .flv . (As far as I know, YouTube uses FLV format videos only.)

MPC does indeed support FLV, though you may also need to install an FLV splitter if you're having problems in playback. (I can't remember if celtic_druid had a newer compile, but I have to find the links, anyway. Otherwise, Gabest's SourceForge directory has the splitter (have to look for that link as well... :/ ))

[mikehende]

yes, I have done that and it works, thanks!