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It’s bound to happen every now and then. Your surfing through the videos on YouTube, marking some of them as Favorites and putting some on playlists to share with others. But every one in a while (or more often), you find a vid that you absolutely love and wish you could snag for your hard drive so you can always have it handy for when you want to watch it again.
Firefox users have the VideoDownload Helper extension to save and even convert your favorite vids. But perhaps you’re like me and prefer to use GNOME’s Epiphany web browser. Except although Epiphany is based on Mozilla’ s Geko rendering engine, you can’t simply install Firefox extensions into Epiphany. Luckily there are quite a few extensions for Epiphany (as well as third-party extensions, as well as unofficial extensions) and one of them is Adam Schmalhofer’s Video Downloader extension.
While it isn’t as flexible as the Firefox extension, Adam’s extension brings a much needed ability to Epiphany. The first thing you will need to do is make sure you have Clive installed (install via apturl), as Clive does the heavy lifting of downloading and converting the video for you. Once Clive is installed snag the files for the Video Downloader from Adam’s brzr repository (yes, you can simply grab the files from the page I linked to). The main files you need are video-downloader.ephy-extension and video-downloader.py, but you can grab the other files if you want. I strongly suggest grabbing the README file (or README.it if you speak Italian).
Once you have the files downloaded, move (or copy) the files to ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions and launch Epiphany. You can move the files into that folder while Epiphany is running, but I recommend at least closing and relaunching Epiphany when installing any extensions. Now, before we enable the extension there is one thing that absolutely has to be done. Get into your Preferences window by running Edit > Preferences from within Epiphany. Even if you want Epiphany to ask you where to save your downloads each time, this extension requires that you have a location specified. Click the box for Automatically download and open files and select the location where you want Video Downloader to save the videos for you. If you want to be prompted where to save your other downloads then simply clear the checkbox once you make your selection. I decided to use the same folder that the Firefox extension uses, simply to keep things simpler. Unfortunately Video Downloader is unable to ask you where to save each video you download with it, so you have to set this preference via the Preferences dialog, but hopefully it will come in a later version of the extension.
Once you have the files in the proper folder (~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions), you have Clive installed, and you have selected where the downloaded videos should go, it’s time to enable the extension itself. Simply go to Tools > Extensions and check the box for the Video Downloader extension. Once it’s checked you’re ready to start downloading.
Go to the page for your favorite YouTube video, and once the page is finished loading you will see a film icon in your status bar. (My screenshot shows the icon from the Mac4Lin theme. You can see the default icon on the extension’s page.) Simply click on the icon and the video(s) on the page will be downloaded as MP4 video files to the location you specified.
One very nice feature I found about from Adam this morning is available if you do a middle-click on the icon. In Firefox and Epiphany middle-clicking a link will open it in a new tab, and if middle-clicking the icon will attempt to load the video file into a new tab. 
What I discovered today, however, is that when I middle-clicked the icon I got an offer to either open the video or simply save it for me. As you can see from the screenshot, RealPlayer 11 is installed on my system and registered as the default MP4 player, and I’m asked if I want to open the file in RealPlayer 11 or save the file. Selecting Save As… will give you the file picker window so you can save the video file wherever you want it, and you will also have an opportunity to rename the file however you want.
For a list of all of the sites that Adam’s Video Downloader extension will work on, simply check out the README file.
I want to send a yooouge THANK YOU! to Adam Schmalhofer for all his help as he helped me resolve some issues I was having. That dude totally rocks, and I owe him several brews.
