Grab those videos!

I've often felt a bit annoyed that YouTube doesn't allow us to download videos from their website. It's frustrating because some of them deserve repeat viewing, and you don't always want to connect to the Internet to do so (would also be great to email some of the videos as well).

This weekend I was making a mock up video of the CSI Miami intro with my daughter appearing at the end, basically because she I had a bit of film of her removing sunglasses in the same way as Horatio does in the series and thought it would be funny. I found the intro clip on YouTube, and knew I wouldn't be able to download it so I attempted to film the clip showing on my laptop using first my iPhone and then my digital camera, but the results for both were very disappointing (poor quality image with light reflected in the laptop screen).

I then did a bit of Google searching to see if I could find the intro clip anywhere on the Internet available for download (for free, of course). After browsing for a while, I came across a website that can download videos from the URL you give it, usually with a choice of file types as well. It required downloading a piece of software, but my anti-virus download scanner said it was safe so I went ahead to see if it would work.

After executing the software, I entered the intro clip URL from YouTube and hit download. The movie file was created in about 10 seconds. I opened it up in Windows Movie Maker and was able to watch and edit the intro clip exactly as I wanted to. Perfect!

I was fairly satisfied with the end result. It probably would have come out a lot better if I was using a better video editing software - Windows Movie Maker is quite limited in it's editing capabilities, particularly when it comes to graphics and titles. I had to make do with the standard tools to produce my little movie, but it still came out more or less as I had imagined it.

Anyway, the website (and software) I found for downloading videos is called "save vid" - I would recommend this to anyone who wants to do the same as I did. The software itself is free and as mentioned above it passed a virus scan so hopefully it's fairly legit. Works well for grabbing those videos!

Not sure if this link will work (I posted the vid to my Facebook profile), but here's the video.

If it doesn't work I'll upload my video to YouTube and put the URL to that on here. That would actually be quite ironic...