Did you ever find a great video on YouTube and thought to yourself “Wow! I can REALLY use this video on my upcoming sales/marketing/business presentation.”? This discovery is quickly followed by crushing disappointment as you realize that the videos can not be saved on to your computer.

Linking the video URL into your PowerPoint Presentation may provide a solution, but what if you arrive at the meeting and discover that you will have no internet access? Nothing burns a presentation like a ‘technology malfunction’.

Enter Firefox and its impressive library of Open Source add-ons. A web tool called VideoDownloader allows you to save any protected online/flash video from the internet into your computer’s hard drive by simply copying and pasting the URL

into the web application. With Firefox and this nifty little tool, you can go to any of the popular video websites and simply click the application’s icon appearing on the Firefox address tool bar and voila! The video is saved.

The usual suspects are supported: YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, Metacafe, and Daily Motion. You can try your luck with other sites, some of them will work. Click the thumbnail to see it in action!

One caveat does exist though. You have to use another program to convert the videos from Flash to a format that can be played by your favorite media player (AVI, MPEG, WMV, etc.). VideoDownloader has a complementary conversion program to help you do this if you wish.

I hope you find this tool as useful as I did. Cheers!