How To Download MetaCafe/Google Video/YouTube Videos From Terminal

Recently, we have covered downloading of youtube videos from command line terminal here using youtube downloader called youtube-dl . Now, here's an alternative that download's video from many video websites like Google Video, Metacafe, Sevenload including YouTube and saved it as MP4 video file.

Introducing Clive Video Downloader

Clive is a linux video extraction terminal tool for user-uploaded video hosts such as Youtube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Guba, Metacafe and Sevenload. Clive can be chained with 3rd party tools for subsequent video
re-encoding and video playing.

Clive Installation

# yum -y install clive

Clive is part of Applications under Multimedia.

Clive Terminal Usage

# clive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFe5Aoh7hi8

clive 0.4.20 20080729  [Linux]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-D32RwsD_w&fmt=18                          100%
warn: no-media: switched to low-quality
AndyRoddickSlowMotionForehandSideView.flv                               987.4KB
=> 1 (987.4KB), failed: 0, skipped: 0
AndyRoddickSlowMotionForehandSideView.flv     100%  987.4KB    5.9KB/s 00:02:48

Clive Video Scanning from Website


Clive video extraction tool can also be used to scan video files from websites.

# clive --scan http://www.youtube.com

clive 0.4.20 20080729  [Linux]
scan: http://www.youtube.com
scanning... ....5....10.... done.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=M_rmqKVOI-U&fmt=18                      100%    1/14
RoadTrip.mp4                                                              6.8MB
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0AW-LgDx_Qk&fmt=18                      100%    2/14
SaidtheRaindroptotheSeedtheYouMesongoriginal.mp4                         16.0MB


Clive Video Scanning from RSS Feeds

Alternatively, clive video extraction feature can scan embedded videos from RSS feed urls as well.

# clive -rss "http://youtube.com/rss/user/clipcritics/videos.rss"

Clive also supports website authentication when video extracting from file. Clive can accept username and passwords as parameter website authenticatiion post before extracting or scanning website embedded video links.

Clive Vide Re-Encodeing Feature

One highlighted feature of clive is to integrate its parameter function to 3rd party linux softwares such as vlc and ffmpeg. This feature provides extra feature for clive to re-encode extracted video to another video format. The output format can be of anything as long as ffmpeg can recognized them.

# clive --ffmpeg="/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i %i %o" --play=mpg http://youtube.com/watch?v=09eirNF6vD4

The above extracts the video from the URL, re-encode it using ffmpeg and play the re-encoded MPG video file.

Clive Video Player Feature

To specify a different default video player with clive, simply

# clive --player="/usr/local/bin/vlc --fullscreen %i"

The above changes the default system video player to VLC video player.

Clive Multiple Video Extraction

Clive is so feature-enriched that it supports file-based URL list to extract multiple videos from different locations in one time.

# cat url.list

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dr3qPRAAnOg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VlFGTtU65Xo

# cat url.list | clive

Clive Output File Format

Clive supports multiple video output depending on source location of extracted videos. Here's the list

Video Source            Output File Format

Youtube.com             flv/mp4

video.google.com      flv/mp4

dailymotion.com        varies

guba.com                  flv

metacafe.com            flv

sevenload.com          flv

myvideo.(de|ch|at|nl|be)  flv

See more details of clive.

All is done.

Related Posts:

Youtube Video Downloader