Downloading videos

I suggest downloading any videos you might want to see again. You never know if a video will get taken down or if you will forget the name of the video or where you saw it. You can either download the streaming video, or you can try to find a downloadable version on another website. It's a lot easier to download from streaming, so you should do that as long as the quality is high enough.

To download streaming video, my recommendation is to switch to Firefox (at least for downloading if not for everything else you do online) if you are currently using another browser, and download the Video Download Helper Plugin. Once you install the plugin and restart your browser, you will see a new icon at the top left of Firefox. Whenever there is a video available for download (you will have to go to the website hosting the video, which you can typically do by left clicking on the name of the site or by right clicking the video and choosing to go to the hosting website), you will see what looks like balloons twirling around. Click on the arrow next to the balloons to get your download options. On Youtube, you will have multiple options depending on which quality of the video you want to watch (I recommend the highest, of course, unless your computer can't handle it). There is an option to convert videos to the desired format after the download is complete, but it didn't work for me, and I'm using Full Video Converter, which does a great job converting flv to avi without any loss of quality. This plugin also works for Dailymotion and a few other websites.

It does not, however, work for Vimeo. Many Vimeo videos allow you to download them, with a link on the right side of the page after scrolling down a bit. If a video does not allow downloading, you can cheat with a website like SaveVideo by entering the URL of the page with the video you want.

Also, I am going to start including download links for a lot of videos, particularly when the video quality is much higher than what I have found streaming. These links are to Oron, a file-sharing site that allows free downloads but allows you to download much faster if you buy premium access. It's definitely not necessary, but if you should decide to buy premium access, Oron is particularly useful for downloading videos from some great adult forums, such as Planet Suzy, Phun, and Porn-W. If you buy premium access, the way you get fast download speeds is by using a download manager such as Orbit. If you are downloading as a free user, you have to wait before downloading and then wait again before you can download the next video. It's pretty slow, but it gets the job done.

Finally, I recommend watching the downloaded videos with Media Player Classic. I don't like having the video be so small that there's a lot of black space around it or so big that it gets partially cut off. MPC makes it very easy to zoom in and out so the video looks exactly how you want it.