Thursday, May 15, 2008

Speed Download goes to 5.0.3 and adds YouTube support

So, say you're wasting time over at youtube, and you come across Ladies of the World, by Flight of the Conchords, and you think to yourself "Boy, wouldn't that be nice to have to watch later because you never know when the internet will implode, leaving us without the 24/7 access to cats playing piano that I've become accustom to."

And you think to yourself that you may have to go and download one of a hundred programs that are designed to download youtube videos.

But then you see that Speed Download has added Youtube downloads to the latest version. And you were one of the lucky people to have got Speed Download as part of the last MacHeist (and you took advantage of the free upgrade to version 5).

Having all these conditions met, you download the latest version of Speed Download, and...

Nothing. It says youtube support is via "contextual menu", but doesn't give you any clue as to what contextual menu they mean. 

But I have the secret. Which I shall reveal to you here publicly for the first time (it's a scoop! Whehew!)

Restart Safari. 

That's it. That was the problem. And it took an email to tech support to figure that out. 

Once Safari has restarted, simply go to the page you want to download the video from, and right click anywhere on the page (that isnt' the actual video; click there and you get the Flash Player contextual video).  Now where it said "Speed Download: Disable Speed Download, there is a new option to "Download YouTube video".

That's it. 

Once you have it on your machine, you still have to figure out how to play it (I'm using the sometimes finicky Adobe Media Player which works great for playing videos that reside on your own machine. )

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