James Little @ NZfusion.com

I don’t want to download all video into permanent locations on my computer. I want to be able to watch video without it jumping around and waiting to download. I know that the broadband in New Zealand isn’t fantastic, but I also know that video quality will continue to improve as people can upload better quality video.

I just want to be able to go to a website and be able to download and watch a video as fast as I can… isn’t most video online such that a tool like flashget can split the file and download multiple streams… and estimate how long it will take so it doesn’t start playing until it can realistically keep ahead of the playing content?

I think I have all the tools on my computer, greasemonkey (to embed javascript into webpages - it is a cool firefox plugin), flashget… several video players… it seems like it would be possible to implement… I’d like it on my computer. But I don’t want to be downloading video all the time, storing it, finding it and opening it… I want a script to do it all.

I did find a greasemonkey script that exposed the download link for google and youtube, I guess all I would have to do is take this script, alter it to replace the video content with the downloaded file… and all I’d have to do is hook up flashget to download it and work out where the file was saved… if I gave the script increased privileges it could probably do all of this by itself - but who wants a script that downloads and saves files on your computer! Ah yes, well I do… but I think I can trust myself? Can I trust other sites to behave themselves around the script which such privileges though? Nope.

So some manual input obviously required.

Update I did find a downloader for Firefox that grabs embedded video streams, attempts to get them as AVI or similar and will forward through to you flashget downloader. The issue I have noticed with Google video is two-fold, google video appears to be faster than youTube (this probably depends on the picture quality more than the servers) and the download only allows a single stream… for flash get downloader type tools to be useful, multiple download streams need to be available. Once the video is downloaded, you obviously also need to go and find it - like I said, I’m not actually interested in keeping it… I just want to be able to watch links that friends send me occasionally.

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