If you watch videos on YouTube or Google Video, or other similar websites, you might have already bumped into an issue of not being able to download online video you like to your computer. Unfortunately those websites don't offer the painless video downloading. However there is a great solution to download online video from YouTube! Among others you will find DownloadHelper - a free Firefox plugin to download video from YouTube.

After you installed the plugin, you should see a new icon in Firefox toolbar. DownloadHelper doesn't consume much of system resources and can be disabled if not used for some time.

Download online video from YouTube in a couple of mouse clicks:

1. The DownloadHelper icon becomes animated when it recognizes the objects for downloading. Right-click the icon for a context menu.
2. Choose the needed file in the menu and the download will start.

After you got the FLV file you can convert it to various file formats, depending on what you are going to do with it. If you are going to play the video on other computers or on DVD players, the most suitable solution will be AVI format. Any player and operating system supports this format nowadays.

Question:

There are some services that download online video, but before that convert FLV to other formats. What are the disadvantages?

We answer:

It all depends on your personal preferences, however it is well-known that the more you convert the video the worse is its quality. It is much better to download online video in its original format and then only once convert it to the desired format.

Some other articles that you might be interested in:

• How to convert FLV files
• Online FLV converter