Movgrab: Command Line Video Downloader

Movgrab is a command line tool for downloading video clips from websites such as YouTube, Daily Motion, Break.com, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Liveleak and others.

Movgrab features:

• proxy support
• write the download to std-out so you can easily play the video in an external application
• lets you pick the preferred video/audio formats for sites that offer more than one
• generic downloader which means Movgrab might be able to download videos from other websites not listed as supported
• can resume downloads (use "-r" - only works when writing a single file)
• fork into background (use "-b" flag)
• written in straight C so it has no dependencies

Full list of supported websites: 

• YouTube
• Metacafe
• Dailymotion
• Vimeo
• Break.com
• eHow
• 5min.com
• vbox7
• blip.tv
• Ted
• MyVideo
• ClipShack
• MyTopClip
• RedBalcony
• Mobando
• Yale University
• Princeton University
• Reuters
• LiveLeak
• Academic Earth
• Photobucket
• VideoEmo
• VideosFacebook
• Aljazeera
• Mefeedia
• IViewTube
• Washington Post
• CBS News
• Euro News
• MetaTube
• MotionFeeds
• Escapist
• Guardian
• RedOrbit
• Sciive
• Izlese
• uctv.tv
• royalsociety.tv
• British Academy
• Kitp
• Dotsub
• Astronomy.com
• Teachertube.com
• Discovery
• Bloomberg.com

Using Movgrab

To download a video using the default options, simply run:

movgrab 'URL'

Where 'URL' is the URL of the video you want to download, e.g. "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QP-SIW6iKY". It's a good idea to use quotes for the URL, in case it contains special characters.

To specify the filename, use "-o" flag, like this:

movgrab -o VIDEONAME.mp4 'URL'

To be able to resume a video download, use "-r":

movgrab -r 'URL'

If you want to specify the video format and quality, firstly you'll need to get a list of supported video formats. Example:

movgrab -T 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QP-SIW6iKY'

Which should return something like this:

Formats available for this Movie: webm:640x360 flv-h264:640x360 mp4:480x360 flv:400x240

Now you can specify in which format to download your video. Let's say we want to download the video in webm, with a 640x360 resolution:

movgrab -f webm:640x360 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QP-SIW6iKY'

Now, let's say you want to watch a video using mplayer, without having to download it firstly - since Movgrab can write the download to std-out, all you have to do is run:

movgrab -o - 'URL' | mplayer -

Example:

movgrab -o - 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QP-SIW6iKY' | mplayer -

For more options and info, run "movgrab" (without any flags) in a terminal.

Install Movgrab

Ubuntu users can install Movgrab by using the main WebUpd8 PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install movgrab

For Arch Linux, get the latest Movgrab via AUR.

And finally, for any Linux distribution, download the source from HERE, extract it and compile it:

./configure
make
sudo make install

application seen on UpUbuntu

Source