Using DownloadHelper to Download Streaming Movies from The Internet

Video portals are one of the most popular websites on the Internet. Sites like Youtube, Dailymotion, MySpace and even Facebook provide users with videos that they can watch on the sites. Youtube alone is a website that adds thousands of videos per hour to its impressive video inventory all thanks to users who upload the videos to the most popular video portal on the Internet.

Watching videos online has a few disadvantages, namely sometimes bad connections which stop the video during playback. The video player controls that are available on the video portals are also not the most comfortable ones, forwarding or rewinding the movie usually results in pauses and sometimes additional loading times.

Those are the main reasons why users have the desire to download videos from video portals to be able to watch them on their local computer in their favorite video player.

One application that can aid the user in downloading those videos is the Firefox extension DownloadHelper. DownloadHelper supports hundreds of video portals and also some generic streaming formats which virtually make it compatible with many video streaming websites.

The Firefox extension is compatible with both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. The extension can be configured to display a small icon in the Firefox Status Bar which will become automatically active if a video has been found on the active website.

A click on the status bar icon will display all icons and the formats that can be downloaded. A click on a link will start the download of the video immediately.

The preferences of the DownloadHelper extension are quite extensive and provide access to some advanced options that might be useful for some users.

They contain basic preferences like the option to display the icon in the status bar or to animate the icon if a video was found that can be downloaded. More interesting than those generic options are keyboard shortcuts that can be used to initiate downloads without having to use the mouse at all. These options can be mapped to specific keys on the keyboard.

DownloadHelper will automatically recognize high quality videos at Youtube and download those if they are available.

A left click on the icon in the status bar or a visit at the official DownloadHelper website will open the list of supported websites. Each website can be sorted by name, interest, rating, date added and comments. This means the community is providing additional means to discover popular websites from not so popular ones.

A click on each site will open the site’s profile on the DownloadHelper website which is displaying the rating and comments with options to add or rate the website. It also provides the means to load the website in the browser to visit it and download videos from it.

Sites with adult content are not displayed by default. A click on the Show sites with directly accessible adult content will change that.

Here is a short list of supported sites by the Firefox extension:

• Youtube
• Escapist Magazine
• Blip
• MSNBC Video
• How Stuff Works
• Humour.com
• Gametrailers
• Pandora
• Dailymotion
• Google Video

It would literally take weeks to visit all supported sites that are provided by DownloadHelper. You should also keep in mind that the developers are constantly adding new video portals to the list.

Definitely one of the best ways to download videos from hundreds of video portals on the Internet.