So here I was, just finished writing my tutorial on
downloading and converting videos from Google Video and YouTube, when a friend notifies me that the Greasemonkey script wasn't working on Google Video anymore. Bewildered, I decided to get to the bottom of things, and discovered a very nice surprise - it turns out Google is listening to its people, and they've decided to allow downloading of their videos for free! It's apparently a part of their new pay-for-download video service tie-in with CBS (a sample of a paid video can be seen above in the image). Anyway, the big news here is that you can now easily, directly download videos at any video page at the click of a button, and even allows you to choose whether you want to download it as a straight video, for the video iPod, and even for the PSP.
Now here's where it gets tricky. The videos are in a format with an extension of .gvp, which is meant to be played with Google's Video Player, and prompts you to download and install it when you try downloading a vid. I, being the stingy power user that I am, don't want to be bothered with installing yet another useless program on my system just to play some video, so there had to be another way to download the movies as regular AVIs or MPEGs, or at least a way to convert them. Fortunately, discussion over at Digg has an answer. Here are the steps in retrieving a straight-up AVI:
1. Navigate to the Google Video of your choice, and click on the Download button on the sidebar.
2. Cancel the prompt asking you to download the Google Video Player, and instead, click on the link marked "Manually download the video".
3. This saves a 1KB .gvp file onto your computer.
4. Open up the file in Notepad (it's just text), and take note of the URL following the "url:" label at the start of the file. This URL ends before the black square/new line indicator preceding the "docid:" label.
5. Copy the URL, paste it into your browser's address bar, and press Enter.
6. A prompt then asks you to download your video in a handy-dandy AVI format.
I've yet to try out the iPod and PSP versions seeing as I own neither, so if any of you have retrieved videos succesfully using these steps and managed to play them normally in said devices, please leave a comment to confirm.
New and improved [Google Video]