Since there’s lots of interesting content on the internet one can download and edit into short clips for personal use, I have discovered reliable ways to download the content I require. But first a message from our lawyer:
- Downloading videos from YouTube is in breach of YouTube’s Terms of Service, and the company could sue you.
- YouTube has shown no desire to penalize users for downloading videos.
- Downloading copyrighted videos without permission is a criminal act.
- Some videos with the correct licenses are legal to download from a criminal standpoint.
OK, so you have been warned. But what if you still ‘need’ some content. Here’s how one could go about getting it. Let’s start with YouTube video.
Step 1 – Go to YouTube, search for the video you’re interested in and copy the video URL
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeMd9FbdEbI
Step 2 – Now go to the website Y2MATE.COM and paste the YouTube link you copied earlier into the area provided and select your preferred download resolution. If the resolution choices don’t appear automatically, you might need to click START first, then they’ll appear.
Step 3 – Select DOWNLOAD next to your preferred resolution, then DOWNLOAD again once the ‘conversion’ process is done. The downloaded file will appear in your downloads folder with complete.
That’s all there is to it. Another useful feature of Y2MATE is if you only require audio and not the video, they support that as well. In the example above, go to the bottom of the resolution list and select the ‘YouTube to MP3 Converter’ option.
This will open a new page where you can download just the audio in .mp3 format:
That’s all there is to downloading content from YouTube. Now let’s turn our attention to Vimeo, the next most popular video streaming platform (my assessment). To get ready to download Vimeo videos, start by adding an extension to your Google Chrome browser:
Step 1 – In the Google Chrome browser, go to Settings (found by clicking those 3 little dots in the upper right corner of the browser), then Extensions, then Search Extensions and search for ‘Simple Vimeo Downloader‘. Install this extension. Once done, there will be a ‘V‘ with an underline, like this, in your list of extensions:
Step 2 – Now when you go to a video in Vimeo, you’ll be able to select the resolution of the video you wish to download, then download that video. You do this by clicking the Video Downloader extension icon. To the right of the video will appear the ‘V‘ plus the various resolutions available. Select one and the download will begin:
I haven’t yet researched how to download only audio from Vimeo, but that’s not really a problem since there’s a good app for pulling audio off a .mp4 video. My tool for this purpose is ‘Any Audio Converter‘ (aka AAC). The steps for using this tool follow:
Step 1 – Download, install and run AAC
Step 2 – Drag the .mp4 file you wish to pull audio from into the app
Step 3 – Select the conversion output file format you desire (.mp3 audio in this case)
Step 4 – Click Convert Now! Your file will most likely go to the ‘…\Videos\Any Audio Converter\MP3’ location under your primary user account, unless you told it otherwise. Now you have an audio file extracted from the original video. Once your file is converted, AAC will always ask for money. Just say ‘No Thanks’ and you’ll be fine.
So easy after you have done it a thousand times or so!
So that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed the show!
