Saving videos.

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Solutions:

• SAVING VIDEOS TO DISK, FROM YOUTUBE, GOOGLE VIDEO, other services
• NON-GRAINY PLAYBACK AT NORMAL OR FULL SCREEN. Especially suitable for videos over 15 minutes or with fine detail.
  & less power used by computer.
• TAKE ADVANTAGE of the graphics chip every computer has to make the video many times clearer, reduce heat produced and electricity unnecessarily consumed.

There are several disadvantages of watching tiny videos in a web-browser like IE.

[li] The video cannot be saved.[/li]
[li] If the video is removed later you will have no record of what you watched.[/li]
[li] If you want to re-watch a specific section of the video, it can be difficult to skip around until the exact section is found.[/li]
[li] The video is grainy and hard on the eyes[/li]
[li] Tiny details are hard to see, harder at full screen.[/li]
[li] Making the video full screen consumes about 15 to 20 more watts of power from the computer, produces excess heat on a laptop, and the video playback can be very jerky or be very grainy, or both at full screen.[/li]
[li] The computer needs to be connected to a high-bandwidth connection, or the Play button must be pressed, then much waiting, then finally the video has buffered enough to be played.[/li][/list]

If you are new to using the Internet and do not know how to properly save a video from Youtube or Google Video, or other Flash-based video services, It's a simple process and begins with having Firefox installed.

Older folks who do not believe in 'cutting edge', i.e. cutting up wallets, who would like to use the main processor of the computer for something other than interpolating a grainy Flash-based video to full screen for 30+ minutes, should also consider the following steps.

You need:
Firefox (prefer 2.x. Some extensions do not yet work correctly under 3.x)
- UnPlug Add-on for Firefox
Other Add-ons suggested outside the scope of this post, not required to save video
- Recommend: Adblock Plus, subscribe to the various blocking lists
- Recommend: Flashblock, do not play flash content automatically
-- Flashblock with UnPlug, often requires clicking on the Flash video box once, before clicking on the UnPlug icon to save.
- Advanced Recommend Only: NoScript, in Blacklist mode & Turn off Flash blocking within NoScript.
- For those in the land of the imprisoned and the home of the headless sheeple: Vidalia Bundle from Torproject.org allows your location to move outside the country to watch various videos banned on Youtube within it.

Flash-container players:
VLC, Video Lan Client, http://videolan.org. Play .FLV files with full video accelleration. Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Converting video to another format or packaging, for instance for further conversion to DVD by Nero:
FFMPEG or several mouse-friendly video conversion programs exist (usually with FFMPEG underneath).
- Converts .FLV (Flash) to AVI or other packaging and formats as desired.