Question, and if it’s very rudimentary I apologize.
I often use DA to download embedded videos where the only option on a webpage might be to view it in streaming form. However, with Google Video, it does not show the streamed video in the object drawer. Is there some method they use which makes this harder for the browser to recognize? There are occasionally interviews or user made videos that I would like to watch offline, I’m not a big fan of Google Videos option to download a bookmark with their service when using the video viewer.
Unfortunately, Googles uses a proprietary compressor that only the Google Video Player can play. As soon as there’s a QuickTime plugin available for this video encoding format, DEVONthink will naturally support it without any update necessary.
Actually, the new free Perian codec (which is amazing, btw) allows you to play any flv video, which is the format for google videos. I can accomplish my original goal by adding the FireFox extension “VideoDownloader” and open up the saved video right in QuickTime.
Perian just came out, check it out! Now how long till it works with my preference of DevonAgent
If it opens up in QuickTime than AFAIK DEVONagent should also be able to play/download it. Because if the plugin is properly configured it should have added a mime-type/file extension to the list of files that QuickTime can open. And DEVONagent should use that to find out what it can open. Have you given it a try?
Actually, I just gave it a try. The problem is that Google only gives a link for its player. That complicates things for us. Unless they had link to a file, it’s going to be difficult…
Yes, I’ve tried it, the issue is this…on most sites that link to video, I can choose site objects -->embedded multimedia in DA, and download from there. Google Videos interface screen offers a download button, but this is just a bookmark for their proprietary player, not a true download of a video in flv format. The extension I found in firefox makes some additional step that Google apparently doesn’t want and allows me to download the video from google’s source page in .flv or .avi or .mp4 I don’t think it’s doing anything illegal (these are public videos) but it’s obviously adding some sort of script that is hidden in Google’s default interface for downloading a video.
I can watch a Google video in my DA browser…I want the capability to capture any video that I do this with. I tend to capture video almost as much as text with my researching.
So what DA really needs to complete the site objects map, is some sort of script that is more clever about finding linked video. Because as is “embedded multimedia” and “linked video files” doesn’t really work for many pages, Google being a prime example.
There may be a simple or good reason for these things, but I am ignorant of the technology behind these browsers and websites.
Google uses several methods to hide the URL to the real video but the “Objects” drawer of the next release will recognize such videos when using the “Embedded Multimedia” scanner.
Fantastic! I found an add-on that accomplishes just that in some other browsers, but they don’t have the power of DA for other data tasks. Thanks a bunch for looking into this.
