← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · RowdyRoddyPiper

Using dynamic user scripts to download embedded video in Mozilla Firefox

Thread ID: 18219 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-05-13

RowdyRoddyPiper [OP]

2005-05-13 02:38 | User Profile

Dynamic user scripts are a handy feature of Firefox that allows your browser run a post-processing script on a web page once it has been downloaded. You can use this to add extra links e.g. to allow direct download of embedded video files. Many news/entertainment websites offer embedded video but seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to download and save the files to your hard-drive. Here's how to get around that:

You must use Mozilla Firefox as your browser.
Download and install the "greasemonkey" script plug-in from [url]http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/[/url]. This will let you install and manage custom user scripts from within Firefox.
The install file is an ".xpi" file: [url]http://downloads.mozdev.org/greasemonkey/greasemonkey_0.2.6.xpi[/url]. Open using firefox to install the plugin. Close and re-open the brower. After installation a couple of extra options are added to the "Tools" menu to install and manage user scripts.
Install the "unembed" script by right-clicking on this link and selecting "Install user script": [url]http://neugierig.org/software/greasemonkey/unembed.user.js[/url] (it's about 10 lines of code, you can view the code directly by clicking on the link)
Select OK to accept the default installation options, which are to run the script on all pages.

From now on, ALL web sites you browse to that include embedded video will have a handy direct download link next to the video. No more "view source" to find the link to the video file!

Hope this helps,

-Rowdy