Update/Warning: This extension doesn’t work with Epiphany-Webkit. I’m sill trying to figure out the way to write a new extension for the new Epiphany. More information will follow soon.
Videos and web pages are mostly hosted on video hosting sites. Most of them are on youtube. Sadly as they are in flash and flash is evil, non-free and not even platform independent I can’t watch them from my browser. This isn’t a problem as programs like clive can download them for me (which I can then watch with totem).
However most often pages now embed the video directly, not displaying the hosting URL to me. Taking wget and grep it is not difficult to find it nevertheless, however this is inconvenient. Well, actually it was already inconvenient to copy the url to the terminal for clive.
So here is a small Epiphany extension (more here) derived from the Creative Commons license viewer-extension. It displays a small icon on the status bar if the page embeds (currently also if it contains a links to) a youtube video (more sites should follow). If you click on the icon it downloads the video via clive. Even if you have flash this might be useful to you if you want to watch the video offline or in fullscreen-mode.
Limitations are that it currently only works with the gecko backend and if a page has more then one video it downloads all (if you hover the icon it will show how many videos are present). Oh and epiphany does not know anything about the downloading (e. g. download manager).
So if I got you interested please download it (that is actually a bzr git repository) and tell me what you think.
Update: clive currently has two different branches. This extension was developed for the 1.x branch which should be available from your favorite distribution. I didn’t test the 2.x branch yet, however the extension doesn’t require the dropped features, so it might work (if you tested it please post a comment). By the way really feel free to post comments (especially if you are having problems or had problems, it is unlikely that I didn’t forget to explain something). If you are interested in newly added features, here is a Follow-up post.
Troubleshooting: When you click on the video-icon the video(s) should be downloaded into the download folder (as set in epiphany). If that doesn’t happen, than you most likely haven’t installed clive. If the icon doesn’t even show up, then the problem is in the extension itself (most likely a bug).
Bugreports: I screwed up the downloading process for, I think about a week on my computer, which I uploaded 3 days later. So a broken version was available for 4 days. Sorry, for the inconvenience.
Paradoxically, during this time I got more visits (the number of visits is to low for this to be anywhere close to statistically significant, but still). However nobody complained. This is very sad. You can post comments here anonymously without any hassle of registering and I now added my e-mail address to the about-page. If there is anything else I can do to make communication more pleasant, let me know: I know your time is precious.
Warning: There is a bug in epiphany which is giving major problems in this extension. Please read howto temporary fix it.
Warning: Ubuntu’s clive is currently broken (see #418891). Install the jaunty-bleed version to fix (discussed here and here).
19 Kommentare
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18. September 2008 um 19:59
Brian
how do I install this?
Thanks
18. September 2008 um 20:44
blauebirke
Sorry about forgetting the most important thing. Put the files „video-downloader.ephy-extension“ and „video-downloader.py“ into „~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions/“ or „/usr/lib/epiphany-gecko/2.22/extensions/“. Don’t forget to install clive (if you don’t have python-gconf install it, however this should already be done on any reasonable gnome installation). Then you can activate it in the „Tools/Extensions“ menu.
Hope that helps.
18. November 2008 um 14:45
Altra estensione di Epiphany per i video at Janvitus Blog & Repository
[…] si chiama, molto originalmente, “Video Downloader”, la pagina madre la trovate qui, con al seguito le informazioni su cosa può fare e su come […]
22. November 2008 um 19:53
Altra estensione di Epiphany per i video
[…] L’estensione si chiama, molto originalmente, “Video Downloader”, la pagina madre la trovate qui, con al seguito le informazioni su cosa può fare e su come […]
9. Dezember 2008 um 16:01
Đại Nguyện
I did activate the videodownloader in the tools/extension but there’s no icon of it on the status bar ! Can someone help me to solve this ?
9. Dezember 2008 um 17:35
blauebirke
Sorry to hear you are having problems and thank you for asking for help.
First please visit
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/08/free_the_airwaves_whitespace_c.html
and see if the icon appears there. If it doesn’t could you start epiphany from a terminal with „epiphany-gecko http://lessig.org/blog/2008/08/free_the_airwaves_whitespace_c.html“ wait until the page loaded, close epiphany and post (or send me) the output of it?
10. Dezember 2008 um 14:39
Đại Nguyện
This’s what I got when I executed the command you provided :
„bash: epiphany-gecko: command not found“
I have epiphany on my computer, not epiphany-gecko. Do I have to remove epiphany and find package epiphany-gecko ?
One more thing, I am using OpenSuse 11.
10. Dezember 2008 um 14:44
Đại Nguyện
And when I provided the command epiphany with the URL address you provided, it opened the browser but no videodownloader icon.
10. Dezember 2008 um 17:11
blauebirke
So then start in a terminal “epiphany http://lessig.org/blog/2008/08/free_the_airwaves_whitespace_c.html” wait until the page loaded, close epiphany and post (or send me) the output of it.
In the about-dialog (menu „help -> about“) does it say something like „Powered by gecko-1.9“ or does it have the word Webkit (should be the third line)?
10. Dezember 2008 um 18:23
blauebirke
All of th following is irrelevant for your problem. Just wrote it so you know why I mistakenly asked you to run epiphany-gecko.
Your epiphany is what epiphany-gecko on debian based systems is (and epiphany is either epiphany-webkit or epiphany-gecko). This is because epiphany is in the process of switching backends and some distros decided to offer both at the same time. Currently epiphany uses gecko (the one from mozilla/firefox) by default. Next Gnome will (most likely) use WebKit (the one used in safari, chrome). More info in a blogpost from epiphany[1] or in wp about WebKit[2] and Gecko[3].
[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/epiphany/2008/04/01/the-future-of-epiphany/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(layout_engine)
13. Dezember 2008 um 17:00
Đại Nguyện
I ran epiphany in command line as you said and waited until the page finished loading then closed epiphany but it did not return anything in the terminal.
In menu Help->About it say „Powered by gecko-1.8“
14. Dezember 2008 um 20:10
blauebirke
Ok, next try. Could you replace video-downloader.py with this one[1]. And then repeat the usual procedure (don’t forget to close all epiphany windows before starting it in the terminal). This one should be a bit more chatty. If it isn’t I will try the openSUSE liveCD myself. However that would have to wait until end of the week.
[1] http://wwwpub.zih.tu-dresden.de/~s5827060/video-downloader.py
8. Januar 2009 um 23:12
blauebirke
There was a severe bug in the proxy handling (I was stupid) which Yves-Alexis[1] found and sent me a patch (yummy). If you used a proxy, downloading it again should solve the problem. Please tell me the resolut.
[1] http://www.linkedin.com/in/corsac
23. Mai 2009 um 18:10
HOWTO: Grab your favorite YouTube vids in Epiphany « I’m Just an Avatar
[…] Firefox users have the VideoDownload Helper extension to save and even convert your favorite vids. But perhaps you’re like me and prefer to use GNOME’s Epiphany web browser. Except although Epiphany is based on Mozilla’ s Geko rendering engine, you can’t simply install Firefox extensions into Epiphany. Luckily there are quite a few extensions for Epiphany (as well as third-party extensions, as well as unofficial extensions) and one of them is Adam Schmalhofer’s Video Downloader extension. […]
12. September 2009 um 11:37
Jan Girlich
Hi,
I just installed the extension by installing clive and copying the files into ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions and the symbol shows up. But when I click on it an eror message pops up saying:
Exited with status 256.
/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/clive/modules.py:114: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
import md5
/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/clive/cache.py:183: DeprecationWarning: BaseException.message has been deprecated as of Python 2.6
if ‚table exists already‘ in err.message:
error: extraction url (&video_id) not found
error: Traceback (most recent call last):
File „/usr/bin/clive“, line 29, in
Clive().main()
File „/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/clive/main.py“, line 49, in main
Nomad().run(self._say)
File „/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/clive/nomad.py“, line 96, in run
self._check_raw_urls(raw_urls)
File „/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/clive/nomad.py“, line 261, in _check_raw_urls
self._show_queue(raw_urls)
File „/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/clive/nomad.py“, line 402, in _show_queue
Progress(None)._byteshuman(total_bytes),
File „/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/clive/progress.py“, line 92, in _byteshuman
i = int(math.floor(math.log(bytes,1024)))
ValueError: math domain error
I didn’t have the time to look into the code and just wanted to know if this is a known problem and if there is a fix.
Thenks :)
12. September 2009 um 12:05
blauebirke
Nobody expects you to look in the code to solve the problem. Asking first is the right thing to do.
You are using Ubuntu correct? This is a known bug in Ubunut’s clive.[1] Install the jaunty-bleed version[2] of clive and everything should work again. You are the second persion to have this problem with video-downloader, btw.[3]
Hope that helps.
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/clive/+bug/418891
[2] https://launchpad.net/~jauntybleed/+archive/ppa?field.name_filter=clive&field.status_filter=published&field.series_filter=any
[3] https://blauebirke.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/bug-affecting-video-downloader/#comment-68
12. September 2009 um 12:16
Jan Girlich
Oh, I didn’t check the comments on the other blogpost.
Yes, I’m using Ubuntu and it works fine after I installed https://launchpad.net/~jauntybleed/+archive/ppa/+files/clive_2.2.4-1~ppa1~jaunty1_all.deb
Thanks a lot!
13. September 2009 um 06:25
cloudscream
I also had the error in clive before I installled this -> https://launchpad.net/~jauntybleed/+archive/ppa/+files/clive_2.2.4-1~ppa1~jaunty1_all.deb
Thank you for this extension. I just switched to Epiphany from Firefox just three months ago, because I really need a lightweight browser for Gnome. This extension makes things „Firefox-like.“ Hopefully when the stable Webkit version of Epiphany comes out, this extension will be available also.
23. September 2009 um 19:35
Snagging videos in Firefox more easily « I’m Just an Avatar
[…] of the tasks that I kept Firefox for was downloading videos. While Epiphany does have a very nice extension for downloading videos it simply isn’t as robust as the Video DownloadHelper extension for the Fox. Not only does […]