The best videos are on YouTube and Facebook. However, downloading them and viewing them offline later is not an option. Anyone who tries it will run into a large number of limitations and often end up on dingy websites and suspicious software on their PC. However, downloading videos from these sites is possible and can even be done safely.
Whether it’s a concert by your favorite band that is only on YouTube that you want to listen to on your smartphone or a handy clip that fits perfectly into the presentation you’re creating, there are countless reasons why you want to watch a video that online, want to be able to take it offline. Unfortunately, downloading online video fragments is never just possible with the major video platforms and social media, and usually even explicitly forbidden. YouTube, Facebook and others expressly exclude it in their terms of use. The reason for this is often referred to the rights to those videos, but in practice it is mainly to protect one’s own advertising income. Rather than letting you download a video, they just want you to come and watch it again, and again and….
Beware! Danger!
Because the video sites do not offer download, a wide range of websites has arisen that all say they can do that for you. Before you get started, it is important to take note of the risks, not not to use the services, but to do it safely. The first risk is somewhat abstract, but where the video services are not directly on your doorstep, they do so with all those online services and the makers of those download programs. As a result, these sometimes disappear just as quickly as they came. So don’t trust too much that what you use today to your satisfaction will be there tomorrow. A greater danger is that because most users do not want to pay for the download, the creators of those websites seek “alternative sources of income”. And those are unfortunately not the most beautiful. So be prepared for a deluge of commercials but many more aggressive pop-ups and attempts to install unwanted software, mostly adware, on your computer.
Antidote
Nobody wants to pay to download a video clip by allowing spyware or adware on their PC. Therefore, before starting to download video clips from sites where this is not allowed, a number of countermeasures must be taken. Nothing very special, but it is important to make sure that the computer has the latest Windows Updates installed. You do this via Start / Settings / Update and security / Looking for updates and install any updates it finds. A second measure is of course antivirus. This may be a free version, but preferably a slightly more extensive paid antivirus or internet security suite. The security of some free security guards is sometimes just too limited. Finally, it is possible to protect your own privacy a little more emphatically by installing browser extensions such as uBlock Origin, Ghostery or AdBlock Plus that block ads and trackers, and Decentralized this prevents the large content delivery networks from collecting information by not loading frequently used components from the internet but storing them locally. You can easily add these extensions to your browser from the extension library of the browser. In Chrome you can find this by clicking on the three dots at the top right of the address bar and then More utilities / Extensions, in Firefox via the three dashes to the right of the address bar and then Add-ons / Extensions. Find the extension and click to install or Add.
Online downloaders
That it is popular to download videos is evident from the huge range of sites that want to do it for you. The way the sites work hardly differs from each other. Copy the url of the video on YouTube or another platform, paste it in the search box and click on download. Sometimes there are additional options such as choosing a resolution or downloading only the audio or only the video signal. And that often on web pages that are cluttered with advertisements and Download buttons that download completely different things than the intended video.
Keepvid
Keepvid has long been the favorite website to download videos from YouTube and other platforms as well, but it just disappeared all of a sudden. Anyone who now uses the same Google to search for Keepvid or an alternative will mainly encounter a lot of wrong websites. So don’t. Yet there is a real Keepvid restart site and that is… Keepvid. Start the browser and go to www.keepvid.pro. click on YouTube Video Converter. Open a second browser window or tab and go to YouTube. Find the video you want to download and run it. Then copy the url of the video in the address bar and go back to the browser window or tab with Keepvid. Click in the for box Download Now and paste the url of the YouTube video. Then don’t click (!) On the download button behind it, but on it Best Download underneath. If you accidentally click the Download Now button, the antivirus will immediately start and report that a malicious download is started but has stopped. Then close the extra tab where this happens and go back to the video download. Do click on the Best download then an extra tab opens where the video is played. Move the mouse over the video to activate the menu bar. Click on the three dots at the bottom right and choose To download and save the video to the PC.
Other formats
If the Best Download from KeepVid is not also your best download, you will find a number of alternative downloads under the download, such as in Video, the choice to download the video in other resolutions. It seems tempting to download videos in the highest possible resolution, but it is often not. In addition to the fact that every video on the internet has its own resolution and no downloader can download a fragment in a higher resolution than the fragment itself has, in a higher resolution a movie file quickly becomes much larger and therefore more difficult to transport or convert. If you do not want the sound with a video, choose one of the options below Video Without Sound while if you mainly want to listen to the video, then Audio Only the right choice.
Other sources
In addition to YouTube, KeepVid also offers video download options from other popular services such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. These work roughly identically to the YouTube downloader but give just a little more deceptive download buttons. However, they do work. To download a video from Facebook, first open the video on Facebook and click on the three dots at the top right of the video. Choose Copy link. Then go to KeepVid and click on Facebook Video Downloader. Paste the url in the input box and a new tab will immediately open with an adware download that will stop the antivirus. Go back to the real KeepVid tabl and wait for the option Best Download becomes active. Then click on it and save the video to the PC.
Other Sites and Programs
KeepVid is one of many sites that allow you to download videos online. These sites are so popular because it works without having to download, install or buy any software. The price you do pay is that all sites try to make money in a different way, ways that are not immediately user-friendly. With the right security measures, they are very useful, although it remains to be careful!
Use in PowerPoint
A common scenario where downloading an online video for offline use is preferable to streaming the same clip live is using the clip in a presentation. Nobody wants to stand in front of a full house and the fragment does not start, or there are first two advertisements for nonsense products that in the best case still make the whole room smile. So while it is possible in PowerPoint via Insert / Video / Online video use a YouTube video directly in a presentation, don’t! It is better to download the video and put it with the presentation in a separate folder. Then choose Insert / Video / Video on my pc. Then select the movie clip and choose Insert. Place the video on the page (preferably not too small, preferably full screen) and set via Play / Get started / Automatically the video so that it starts playing immediately when the slide is displayed. A big advantage of inserting a video in this way is that you can shorten it, for example to remove an advertisement or a long credits. You do this via Play / Trim video. PowerPoint now loads the video into a mini player where you can set the start and end with the green and red handles. Confirm it with a click on OK.
