Snagging videos in Firefox more easily

Last year I finally got tired of the Firefox bloatware and made the switch to the GNOME project’s Epiphany web browser, although I kept the Fox around for those rare times that I simply couldn’t do in Epiphany, or at least couldn’t do that easily. One of the tasks that I kept Firefox for was downloading videos. While Epiphany does have a very nice extension for downloading videos it simply isn’t as robust as the Video DownloadHelper extension for the Fox. Not only does the Firefox extension let you prefer high quality YouTube videos and even pick which high quality vid you want to use if there are more than one available, it is also smart enough to use the video name from YouTube.

Disclaimer: This tutorial is solely intended to help you enjoy Flash videos when your system runs slowly enough to make you want to view it in a desktop video player like Totem. It is written purely for your own personal entertainment and not to help you download videos for the purpose of sharing them with others. Remember, if you find a video that you just have to share with someone you should send them the URI. That way the hosting web site gets to see how popular their video is.

My problem is that while I can enjoy videos in Epiphany the Flash plugin ends up making the video stutter, which can be a royal pain in the arse. This is especially annoying when I’m trying to enjoy highlight videos from Dodgers games so I tend to save those to my hard drive and simply fire them up in Totem. Unfortunately Epiphany’s extension doesn’t know how to snag videos from mlb.com, or the videos from my local CBS affiliate (I tend to snag video weather reports for my E100 so I can watch them when I’m away from my comp) so getting vids from either site sends me to Firefox. For some reason the Video DownloadHelper knows how to grab vids from both of those sites so until I can help port that info to the Epiphany extension I’ll have to turn to the Fox to help me watch them.

The problem comes when you try to download a video from these sites because there’s no descriptive name affiliated with the video’s filename, so even if you have that option selected for YouTube videos when you try to download the video you get what is shown on the right. (All images on this post will open in a new tab/window so you won’t keep having to use the Back button to get back to this post.) If you only want to snag a single vid it’s no problem but if you want to get at least a pair of vids you end up having to rename the vids yourself.

Today I found a way to get the name set for sites that don’t have a setting for knowing where the video name is located. The very first thing you will need to do, once you have the extension installed, is to enable the option in the preferences. If you have an icon visible simply right click the icon and select Preferences. Now go to Capture > Smart Naming and check the box for Enable Smart Naming.

Close out the Preferences window and select the name of the video as it’s shown on the webpage. Right click the selected text and select Smart naming > Define media title location. You’ll see a dialog pop up where you simply need to confirm that the text listed as the Value for this page is the same as the title you want to assign to the video. This is perfect for those times when you inadvertently select the entire text, and you need to add a letter or so to the beginning or end to the Value. Once you have it matching the text on the web page simply click on OK.

Now when you use the icon to select which video you want to save you get a much more informative filename.

The best part is that every time you visit the page the extension now knows where to look to get the video name, and if you look at multiple videos before deciding to grab one it’s a piece of cake to tell exactly which video you want.

Unfortunately this won’t work on all sites, as I found when I tried to get the latest weather forecast. The bottom line is that if you can’t select the text it won’t work since the function relies on having HTML code to look at rather than text with a Flash application as my local CBS affil uses.