How to download anything you need using open source tools

Downloading streaming contents

Watching online videos requires a good broadband connection, lots of patience, and sometimes it can be a challenge, even if you do have a good connection speed.

It’s a lot better to download the videos you want to watch, and then watching them with your favourite player. The problem is that most of the online video sites don’t offer links for direct downloads, forcing you to play the contents through their embedded Flash-based players (which are quite limited).

If you want to download videos from YouTube, Megavideo and many other similar sites, there’s a Firefox extension that you can use for that purpose. It’s called Video DownloadHelper and you can download it from here.

After installing the extension, all you need to do is start playing some online video (so that the add-on can intercept the required information for downloading the file), and then click on the extension button to start downloading it.

As soon as you start the download, you should close the web page showing the video in the embedded Flash player. If you leave it open, you’ll have two downloads in progress (the one from the Flash player, and the one from the DownloadHelper extension), and it will take twice as long to download the file.

Broadcatching

Broadcatching is the downloading of digital content that has been made available over the Internet through RSS feeds. Instead of having to spend time visiting multiple websites to find what you want to download, you just need to find a relevant RSS feed and add it to your broadcatching client. The program will monitor the feed, and when it finds new contents it will let you know, allowing you to start new downloads with a single click. You can even tell the broadcatching client to download new contents for you as they become available, so the whole process becomes fully automated.

In the following article we’ll talk about some of the best open source tools that can be used for broadcatching.