Videos are an extremely popular media form, combining both visual motion media and audio media into one to create interesting content. This is perhaps why all social media platforms have the option of showing and sharing videos, and dedicated video broadcasting sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, etc are so popular.
People often not only watch these videos online, but also wish to save them in their local storage for viewing later on. But most sites do not allow a direct download of their videos from the site. As a result, many apps and websites have cropped up, that can be used to download videos from these sites to the memory of your device.
These video downloader programs can be either dedicated to downloading videos from a particular or might be capable of downloading from multiple sites. There are other ways too, that bypass this entire method. Some of these techniques are given below:
- Application – Many applications like WinX YouTube Downloader can be used to download videos from many different sites simply by copying and pasting the video link in them.
- Website – There are also many online video downloaders like Video Downloadr, that work the same way as the applications, except they are websites you open in your browser instead of installing to your device.
- Add-on – Add-ons like SaveFrom.Net, although primarily a YouTube video downloaders, can be added to your phone or PC web browser for quick download. They automatically ready the video for download when you copy the video link.
- Source Code – For the sites that do not allow saving videos directly by right-clicking or pressing on the video, there are several ways to do it, depending on the site. Some require you to copy the video link and add an ‘m’ in place of ‘www’ to open the mobile site; in other cases, you must search and copy the link from the developer console or the page source. This method is restricted to PCs.
- Screen Recorder – If all else fails, you can always use a screen recorder like OBS to record both the video and audio parts for saving. It is best to use a recorder that captures internal audio of the device directly, otherwise external noise will end up on the audio part and will have to be removed.
- VLC Media Player – This is a really reliable method, whereby you can download videos from a large number of sites by streaming them from VLC, obtaining the source address and downloading directly from there.
- Screen Media Tracker – These are either extensions like Flash Video Downloader or softwares like JDownloader, that scans a whole webpage, detects the videos I it and allows you to download them.
There are lots of examples of sites and software for downloading videos from any website using the above methods. However, if a site does not have a direct download method, it means they have a licensing agreement with the account owner. In such cases, it is best to ask permission from the owner before downloading.
