Quite often, users of the worldwide network are faced with the need to download a video file from a website for their movie collection. For example, a film on YouTube. As a rule, such a need arises in cases when:
- You want to watch the video in your native player on the computer,
- You want to take it with you on the road (in the internal memory of the smartphone or tablet),
- You want to save a movie to your hard drive to be able to view the file without connecting to the Internet.
Let’s speak about the 3rd case and have a look at several methods you can use to get a new movie to your collection.
1. Direct download
On some sites and video hosting platforms near, there is a download button next to each video. You just need to click on it and wait for some time. The exact time depends on the file size and the connection speed of your Internet.
It is clear that this method of getting new movies is the easiest and most understandable, but not all websites provide this feature.
2. Online services
That’s where you need a service to save videos. One of the most popular and easy-to-use services is savefrom.net.
It supports several popular video hosting sites and platforms including YouTube, Facebook, vimeo.com and others. To download a movie you need, copy its URL and paste it in the field on the main page of savefrom.net, and then click the orange button.
You will be prompted to install the savefrom service on your computer. In my opinion, this does not need to be done, because the video will be downloaded fine without it.
3. Installing plugins in your browser
For every popular Internet browser, there is a huge number of various plug-ins and extensions that solve certain tasks. For example, there are plugins to block ads, protect your PC from viruses, to convert currencies, etc.
There are also plugins for downloading video files from web pages.
In the Chrome browser, this plugin is called Chrome YouTube Downloader. It can help you save movies from YouTube. After installing this plugin, a download button will be displayed next to each video that you are watching.
For Mozilla Firefox, you can choose among three extensions:
- The Video DownloadHelper;
- Ant Video Downloader. After it is installed, a separate folder will appear on the disk for storing downloaded videos.
- Flash Video Downloader.
After installing the Flash Video Downloader extension in Mozilla, you can download the video using the blue arrow. This button will be active if the video can be downloaded. Otherwise, the switch will be gray, not active.
4. Use of programs
At the moment there are quite a few programs that allow you to download videos directly from the URL you entered. The most commonly used program is Download Master; it is particularly useful for users with a slow Internet connection.
There is also an interesting and easy-to-use program Real Player. Its basic version is free. In general, if you need it for downloading videos only, free options will be enough. However, if you need additional options, you will have to buy the full version.
5. Storing downloaded videos
Downloading videos to your computer may be necessary in many cases. However, we must remember that each video takes up a lot of space on your hard drive.
Therefore, if the Internet connection is good, fast, stable, unlimited, then it’s better not to download videos to your computer at all. It’s enough to keep links to an interesting video.
Sometimes it can be true. However, it also happens that the video gets removed from the Internet. In this case, you’ll be sad to lose it. Thus, if you have a huge collection of movies that you like and don’t want to lose, you should think about the ways you can store them.
One of the best ways is to store video is to use the cloud service — for example, Dropbox or Google Drive. Usually, cloud services have mobile apps so that you can access your videos and watch them 24/7. You can even save a video for offline watching on a mobile device.
One more way is to burn the downloaded movies onto a DVD. That’s where you can use free DVD burning software from Freemake. It can download YouTube movies and burn them to a disk right away. It doesn’t seem necessary to burn one video on one disk; you can burn up to 40 hours on movies on a simple DVD.
My friend is packed with an external hard disk of 3 terabytes. At the same time, it doesn’t actually help. Since everything that has been downloaded remains available on the Internet, there is no point in accessing copies on this external hard drive.
There are other extremes. Some users have tens and hundreds of terabytes of downloaded movies. But they do not watch them either. It’s just a kind of habit: to download and put “on the shelf” to be on the safe side. However, if you like it and have such an opportunity, then why not doing it?
There are still many places on earth where there is no access to the Internet with the speed required for watching movies. This is where our downloaded video archives with our movie collections will help us!
