Grabbing bits of Youtube (and other web videos) for reuse using RealPlayer

Big Disclaimer – web videos are usually protected by copyright and intellectual property rights. You, as the user of this equipment, are responsible for complying with the law.  There are specific instances in which you can, under “Fair Use” obtain and use specific portions of copywritten material. If you have any questions or concerns about the legality of your use of other material, please see this website: http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/frequently-asked-questions/toolkit/

The RealPlayer video player has recently been installed on all of the MPS Macintosh workstations. The free RealPlayer video player ( http://www.real.com/) installs two additional helper applications, “RealPlayer Downloader” and “RealPlayer Converter”. These will allow you to download and convert any video that is embedded in a webpage.

Here’s how it works (on a Mac)

1. Launch the “RealPlayer Downloader” application from the Applications folder.  If you don’t see it in the Applications folder, you can get to it by opening RealPlayer and then going to Window > Open RealPlayer Downloader.
2. Navigate to the page with the video you wish to grab in a browser.
3. You don’t have to play the whole video, but it does need to cache in its entirety.  In Youtube, this means letting the download progress bar across the bottom of the video get to the end:
4. Switch to the RealPlayer Downloader application.
5. Click on “Download”
6. Click on “Convert” (This will automatically launch the RealPlayer Converter)
7. Select a “Device” to convert to – iPad or iPhone should work for most general purpose editing/web posting with iPad being “bigger” or you can click on “Custom” to create your own setting
8. It should default to saving to the “Desktop” but you can select another location if you’d like by selecting “Other…” from the “Save converted media to:” pull down menu.  Press “Start” to begin the conversion.
9. You can now view your converted video in Quicktime or import into iMovie to make a compilation or edit however you wish.

Have fun!