One of the real benefits of using Firefox is that there are so many “add-ons” or “plug-ins” that people create and share. One that I just found (and that I really like) is called DownloadHelper. It’s compatible with Firefox3 and it detects any videos on the page you’re viewing and allows you to easily download them. This could be YouTube, Google Video, or any number of other sites that share videos. That in itself is handy, but many videos are Flash-based, with a .flv extension and you need to install a special player to play those and they’re not really standard. What you really want is to convert them to .avi or .mp4 files. Fortunately, DownloadHelper has its own add-ons that include conversion tools.

Once you’ve added the DownloadHelper plug-in (and restarted Firefox, of course), you can right-click on the toolbar button and select Preferences. There’s a tab there for Conversion. You click that and check the box to turn it on. Then you can edit the rule to convert to whatever format you like. You WILL need to download an extra Converter program, but there’s a button right there to do that. Follow the instructions. When you’re done, you’ll be able to click and download, converting at the same time, so the end result is the video you want in the format you want.

Pretty cool!

You do have to be patient though. Once the download is done, then the conversion takes place. The only way to find out when it’s done (besides checking for when the file size stops changing) is to view the Converter Queue (right-click on the toolbar button for that also).