Clive for Downloading Videos
April 10, 2009 by Clair Ching
Filed under Multimedia
Do you ever get a lot of video links from friends over IM and you wish you could actually just save them first? Well, you could download them via clive on the command line. 
clive downloads videos from YouTube
It’s really nifty if you could save them and video them later, without having to browse it on the internet first. At least, for me, I think this is really cool.
Another awesome thing about clive is that it could download videos even from Google Video, CCTV, among others. See? Even other sites with video streaming could be a source for extraction via clive. How nifty is that? Also, the command to use when you want to download a video is easy to remember:
clive <http://www.youtube.com/yourvideohere>
It will save the file from wherever you run it. If you run clive on your home directory it will save the file there.
And in case you still find it a bit difficult to remember there’s a front-end for clive and it’s called abby. It might be easier to use if you prefer something graphical.
I suppose that files downloaded as mp4 would benefit those who use ipods. And at least it’s way better than getting stuck with only flv files. I tried playing the videos I downloaded and they were quite alright. This looks like something I might be using a lot in the coming days. My friends and co-workers give me interesting video links from time to time.
hi claire! well actually instead of going to the commandline, you could use the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox which is really painless.
multimedia business shouldn’t be done on the CLI really. and btw, fedora runs fine on them netbooks.
Kumusta Ka, Claire.
Thanks for the article. I’ve been looking for a simple way to download videos and this may be it. I believe DownloadHelpder only works for videos while they are being watched. Aside from that it has “adult content” options which is an issue for many of us.