As said in the previous article => Best Free Software 17: Downloading Videos from Youtube and other Sites – Part 1 there are many ways one can freely download videos from many different sites like Youtube, Google Video or Facebook. In this article, we shall use Freemake Video Downloader. Like the Firefox-based plugin Video Helper it offers the option to merely download the video file, or convert it to another video format, such as WMV, mp4, several space-saving versions used by mobile gadgets or to even compressed audio, such as mp3. So you can watch that film from Youtube or listen to that favorite song on your mobile phone at leisure if you can get them downloaded and probably converted.
It goes without saying that having a good broadband connection makes downloads fast and painless and a good computer with a good measure of RAM ensures processes like conversion from one format to another do not slow it down (too much) and you can in fact multi-task. If not, downloading and or converting even 50 or 100MB file can otherwise be painfully slow and probably not worth it.
#2. Using Freemake Video Downloader
Download any video from thousands websites! From YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Veoh, Dailymotion and 10,000+ sites. Download MP3 from YouTube, convert any online video to AVI, MKV, MP3, iPhone, iPod, PSP, Android.
The statement above summarizes what you can do with this fantastic free software, but you can get a whole list of its features at Freemake Video Downloader.
So after installation and starting the program, that is what you will see. You can download videos from a very large number of supported sites, shown by clicking the Help button => Supported sites. We shall however concentrate on Youtube.
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Downloading a video
To download a specific video, find it on Youtube and copy its WHOLE web address, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTJdekNIl_E, turn to freemake video downloader & click the “Paste URL” button. Freemake will try to see if it can get it and immediately start downloading. It is important to know some videos have been set up in such a way they cannot be downloaded or in case download is not supported in a particular case, Freemake downloader will tell you to watch the video from the site itself. If you have a good internet connection, download speeds should be no problem and you need a couple of minutes for anything between 10 – 300mb. If you have a slow connection, that is of course a very different story.
Settings
Via the Options button, you can change a number of settings as you can see, including the interface language.
Default settings where used for the video format, which in the above case is “mp4” for which you need appropriate players and codecs on your PC to playback [see below]. By clicking the “Download” link, though, you have a drop-down menu showing a number of options your file can be converted to, including common video formats like WMV (Windows Media Video), you can have your music video converted to the compressed audio mp3 format and we also have in the lower section formats for mobile gadgets.
You can change the target folder by clicking the link shown by the arrow on the right.
As implied in the introduction, in order for the PC not to slow down too much and do quick conversions, you need a good amount of RAM, possibly considerably more than 1GB, especially if you would like to multi-task at the same time.
A player that can play back almost all video & audio content is the VLC Media Player – just in case you PC cannot play any of those downloaded or converted files. Alternatively, you could install the K-Lite Codec Pack or the K-Lite Mega Codec from free-codecs.com, both of which have most commonly used video & audio codecs or both. With any of these players on your PC, i.e. VLC & that installed together with the codecs, you do not need any conversion, though.
System requirements
Free Video Converter works on Windows Systems Win XP, Win 7 & Win 8.
So now there is no reason why you cannot download your favorite videos or compile your own mp3 music files for your mp3 player from Youtube … and other supported websites for personal use.
Download Freemake Video Downloader
You can get this from the publishers download page right => here.
#1 Using Video Downloader Helper – a Firefox Plugin tutorial