For the first time a video on Vimeo.com lured me to their website where, as a Vimeo newbie, I was confronted with the PowerPC conundrum of having flash installed but it being so crappy it made the video unwatchable. So I thought, there's Mactubes for Youtube and ways to convert flash to .mp4 on Youtube. Maybe there's the same for Vimeo. And after a little searching I found three (three!) reliable ways to download Vimeo videos as .mp4's.
The first is www.downloadvimeo.com. It's just a simple website where you paste the video url into the download field and it downloads the .mp4 to your default download folder. Simple, though this being a website, you never know if it'll disappear overnight, so I went looking for an application or Firefox add-on that'll do the trick, and indeed there are two (two!) Firefox add-on solutions.
First is FlashVideoReplacer. It works on Youtube and other streaming sites as well as Vimeo, and it gives you the option of watching the vid either embedded with the Quicktime plug-in, or you can also download the .mp4 to your hard drive. For embedded playback you need your Quicktime plug-in enabled.
The second add-on is a Greasemonkey script called Free Youtube! Also works with Youtube as well as Vimeo. When you install it, instead of the embedded video you get a simple download link in its place. Downloads the .mp4 to your hard drive, and that's that.
And there's 270 more words dedicated to getting around flash on PowerPC. They're gonna have to build the modern day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria to store it all.
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These are great suggestions, and ones I hadn't thought to look for. Vimeo content almost always results in stuttery performance...usually in the audio portion of the playback. I'd gotten into the habit of using Safari's Activity Window to ferret out the source URL for the mp4, which I then pasted into Firefox. That would open a blank tab with the QT UI as it loaded. Once the mp4 D/L was complete, I'd save it to my desktop for viewing.
ReplyDeleteThis is a cool solution to that hassle.
The "Net Video Hunter" addon for Firefox (also works on TenFourFox, of course) lets you download any streaming video and save it in .mp4 or .flv formats with a single click. Works great on Vimeo and i have tested it on several sites with a 100% of good results. For YouTube i use MacTubes, but i recommend this addon for everything else.
ReplyDeletehttp://netvideohunter.com/