Firefox3 Beta and flash video downloader

UPDATE: a better plugin for flash downloading has been released. Read more about it here.

As the recently released Ubuntu stable version Hardy Heron 8.04 comes with Firefox 3 (beta), my previous used plugins to download videos from Youtube aren’t currently supported, as they are mainly written for Firefox 2.x.

Therefore I had to use the Flash Video Resources downloader to be able to download those videos, which works flawlessly.

Clicking this blue symbol in the bottom right corner enables you to download the video you currently loaded via youtube:

A new page will popup after clicking the symbol, which is self explaining. Just hit the “Get Video” button, right click on the appearing “Get Flv” Field and hit “Save as” in the menu popup of firefox.

It is important, that you rename the video according to the desired name, following the type .flv.

That’s it.

How to convert movies to mp4 using avidemux2

I recently bought a Sony Ericsson K770 mobile, which is a pretty neat piece of phone.

The phone supports playback of videos in different formats, including .mp4 or .3gp. As I would like to be able to convert videos from different sources to .mp4 using Ubuntu, I found a nice and easy method to convert dozens of Source formats to mp4.

All you need is a decent version of avidemux2, which can be installed in Ubuntu using the following command:

(or your preferred apt gui)

sudo apt-get install avidemux

First look at avidemux: