Firefox Downloadhelper Converter Free
My favorite tool for downloading YouTube clips on Mac is the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox. It’s convenient, quick and even converts videos into the format of your choice while it downloads. For a while however I’ve been plagued with a “Conversion requires external application” error message when downloading certain clips.
Normally, when you purchase a license from Firefox with Video DownloadHelper installed, the license will be automatically installed. If this is not the case, or you already had a license, go to VDH settings, More > Conversion and click Register an existing license, enter your license key and click Register license. Official site for extensions and themes for Mozilla Products, including Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey.
The exact error read: “Conversion requires an external application that appears to be missing on your system. Configure conversion? > Cancel > OK.” When I selected OK, it opened the Preferences for DownloadHelper highlighting in red the location path for the selected converter option which is either FFMpeg or MEncoder.
Advertisement
I eventually found the start of the solution was to install the ffmpegX video/audio encoder for Mac. ffmpegX is basically a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to operate more than 20 video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg which is a very fast video and audio encoder. A k sawhney measurements and instrumentation ebook free download.
For the purposes of correcting the DownloadHelper error, you don’t actually need to use the ffmpegX interface. You do however need it to use it to install the mpeg2enc binary for ffmpegX. Once you’ve installed ffmpegX, you’ll be immediately taken to the main interface where you’ll be prompted to load 3 binaries. You only need to load one binary to fix DownloadHelper – the mpeg2enc binary – which can be found here.
You don’t have to worry about the mencoder or mplayer binaries but you do need to check the box next to mpeg2enc and locate the binaries that you’ve downloaded onto your hard drive. The resulting installation places the binaries in your Mac’s application support library. The final step is to re-open your DownloadHelper preferences (in Firefox’s Tools menu) and enter the path where the binaries are located. For most people, it will be “/Library/Application Support/ffmpegX”:
When the DownloadHelper logo animates next to the URL bar while you are using YouTube, you should now be able to download videos again with it. However, it hasn’t worked perfectly for me. For some reason, videos are being downloaded to a temporary file on my Mac rather than the directory I’ve configured downloaded files to be saved in DownloadHelper. In addition, the files are not being converted to QuickTime format they were previously. However, I can sort-out all of this by manually moving the files and converting them myself later. The important thing is that this work-around allows you to download YouTube clips again using DownloadHelper.
I'm trying to get the Firefox Extension 'Video Download Helper' (VDH) to convert and record videos. The suggested way of doing this is to install a precompiled version of libav called 'Convert Helper' from the VDH Homepage.
I'm not willing to do that for various reasons.¹
So I want to install libav on my Windows 7 (x64) system and point the addon to the right .exe/.dll/whatever it needs. There is an option to enter a 'converter path' manually in the settings, although it does not work for me - probably because I'm not entering the correct path. The entered path just disappears after I click on the 'Recheck converter' button. (I'm not really sure if the corresponding field is even made for input. You can see a picture of the settings page here in the 'Using conversion rules' section.)
The question is: How do I install libav correctly?
libav provides Windows builds in the download section, but I don't know where to put the extracted files or how to make the Firefox addon recognize the installation. Do I just throw the .dlls and .exes in the System32 folder or probably somewhere in the system's $PATH variable? Is there any other way?
Any ideas are much appreciated.
¹One of them is that they want me to pay for a completely free codec to avoid watermarks which is (a part of) why they appear on libav's Hall of Shame (remark (3/29/2016): the Hall of Shame is removed until further notice). On Linux there's no problem whatsoever (see installation instructions for Linux). Another reason is the fact that I want to have some level of control about what's installed on my system and that 'ConverterHelper.exe' obviously is not just a compiled version of the libav codec.
3 Answers
Solution
Use a build from libav.org and extract it to some folder.
Create a .reg file with this content and adjust InstallFolder accordingly, e.g., C:binlibav-11.3-win64win64usrbin
Background
I powered up a VM and did some analysis of the ConvertHelper3Setup.exe and found:
VDH looks at the registry for this key:
Then it looks at this folder (the default would be C:Program FilesConvertHelper3) and checks if there is an executable avconv.exe. If it is, the converter works.
The latest ConvertHelper3Setup.exe (as of 29. March 2016) installs avconv 11.2
I downloaded the newest release (11.3) from libav.org, and everything still works. Can be found here:
This is the general download folder for builds:
I tried the same and discovered two problems with that:First, at least my version (5.3.1) of VDH seems only to look into Program FilesConvertHelper3 for the avconv.exe file, no matter what I enter for the path.
Second, the watermarking is not in the downloaded codec, but a native feature of libav used by VDH to mark the result. So even if one exchanges the libav library, VDH still uses it to place the watermark.
To solve this issue you would need to recompile avconv with leaving out the watermark feature (best ignore it at command line) or put a filter program named avconv.exe which calls the real avconv.exe, but with arguments cleaned of the watermark command. Unfortunately, both solutions are quite a bit of work.
Firefox Downloadhelper Converter Free
This reply might be a little 'tongue in cheek' but I just kicked myself a little for searching this topic in the first place.. Because.. (this should be relevant on a superuser forum) every time I upgrade the hardware Windows is running on, the old PC gets re purposed as my Linux box and I run a KVM switch for them. I've tried VMs and used both OS as hosts, dual boot etc.. simply recycling hardware seems to work the best - simplest - least complicated etc. Some stuff has to run on Windows and Linux has better tools. Sooo the video that didn't want to convert on Windows.. Hit the scroll lock and load the same url on Linux, problem solved :)