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.

Screenshot of epiphany with the video download extension on http://lessig.org/blog/2008/08/free_the_airwaves_whitespace_c.html

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 extesion. Please read howto temporary fix it.