Video Download Helper: An Essential Firefox Extension
If you're a Firefox user and you're viewing and possibly sharing an increasing amount of video content, one of the best Firefox extensions you can get is Video Download Helper. It helps you download and convert formats from the many video hosting sites online, and you can also use it to manage audio and picture galleries. You can save downloaded video and audio content in many formats with it, including WMV, ASF, AVI and MP3 formats, and keep videos organized. Here's a look at how it works.
You can find a series of tutorial videos online showing how to use Video Download Helper. You can also use Video Download Helper in conjunction with many other video-centric plug-ins.
To get started with Video Download Helper, you surf to a site that houses video content, and an icon on your Firefox toolbar, as seen at left, will become animated, letting you know that the extension can help you. The icon shows up just to the right of the home icon on the Firefox toolbar, and looks like three balloons, as seen at left. When you play video content, the right arrow next to the extension's icon allows you to record and save.
When you are on a page at a video site, just hover your mouse over the links for videos. You can download batches of videos, or save and convert them one at a time. In the screenshot seen at left, I have right-clicked on the Video Download Helper icon, which lets me set many kinds of preferences for what I want done with videos that I am going to save and convert.
In the screenshot seen below, I clicked on Preferences after right-clicking on the Video Download Helper icon, which gives me access to many kinds of conversion and capture options. I can also specify where I would like to collect downloaded videos. YouTube is hardly the only site you can use Video Download Helper with. On hundreds of sites housing videosent, the extension's icon will become animated, and you can set your preferences and capture. It's easy, and it helps me stay more organized as I collect more and more videos from around the web.