Beyond the Sky

If you know www.youtube.com, i may feel frustrated where you have to wait for so long to download a video clip for streaming. After downloading, you can't save it, you can only play it for once, because it uses flv.(Flash Video format)

If you have google enough, you will already discover that, you can still download it to a file and play it using your player. To do this, you need 3 programs, vlc, firefox and geasemonkey extension.

First of all, download and install firefox 1.5 and vlc player.
Secondly, download geasemonkey and restart firefox. Gease monkey is a firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior. Next, you need a script that allow you to download the flv from youtube. Right click here and click "install user script"

Now you can go to youtube and grab your fav video clips. Howto refers here.

To play the files that you have downloaded, use vlc. Enjoy!

It do works at ubuntu linux, but you have to compile the vlc 0.8.4a because the precompiled binaries come with apt-get is not updated. Compilation tooks an hour using MAC G4, and resolves dependencies takes more time. I haven't have time to work on it yet. Maybe i ll wait for 0.8.4a precompiled version.