Radbox offers a different solution for this, and several other related, situations. The online service basically collects, or saves, information about videos that you want to watch at a later time, with options to do watch those saved videos at any time at their website, or a compatible RSS reader.

That’s helpful for users who get video links regularly that they cannot watch immediately, but also for users who like to visit multiple video portals to find new interesting videos (the type that collects first and watches later).

The main way of saving online videos to your Radbox account is with the help of a bookmarklet. Just click on the bookmarklet whenever you are on a page with videos. But the bookmarklet is not the only way of adding videos to the account.

Users can add videos by email. The Extras page of their account lists a secret email address that they can use to save videos to their account. They can for instance forward an email with a video link to their Radbox email address. Video links of supported services are automatically parsed and the videos added to the video list of the account.

Another option is the integration of Radbox in Google Reader. The configuration adds a link to Radbox to Google Reader which, when clicked, saves the videos on the page to the Radbox account. The service supports way over one hundred video services, from Youtube over Gametrailers and Justin.tv to The Guardian, Bravo TV and Fox Sports.

Lets talk about accounts for a second. New users can create a Radbox account by entering an email address and password. No verification or additional details are required.

All videos that have been saved to the account are listed on the main account page first, from where they can be moved to the favorites or archives later on.

A click on a video opens the embedded video on a new page. Video controls are taken from the hosting video portal, and additional options added by Radbox. It is for instance possible to visit the video source, share it with friends at Twitter, Facebook or per email, display the video description or add it to the favorites, trash or archives.

The other videos that are currently saved on the user’s frontpage are displayed below the playing video. A click on any of them loads them directly on the same page.

Radbox offers a rich media RSS feed for videos that can be added to compatible RSS readers such as Google Reader or Boxee so that it is theoretically not necessary to visit the Radbox page again after the account has been setup and the RSS feed url copied.

Especially the extra features, like RSS integration, make Radbox more than just an online tool to save and watch videos from multiple video sources. Is it enough to use the service regularly? That depends largely on the amount of videos and video links a user receives and discovers throughout the day. If the count is high enough it may be worth it.

Video Cache View is a portable software for Windows that offers a different method. The free application can identify online videos that are stored in the web browser cache. Video portals like Youtube for instance use this method to stream the video to the user.

It is perfectly possible to look in the cache folder manually to find the videos. Video Cache View offers several advantages and options that the manual method is not offering.

The software supports the popular browsers Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer. It is furthermore possible to add other web browsers as well as long as they are running on the system.

It may be necessary to add the cache folders manually to the application which is handled in the advanced program options accessible under Options > Advanced Options.

The double-click action can be configured in the options as well. Available are to open the video’s properties window, to open the url in the default browser or to play the video directly.

Items can be filtered from the main interface to filter out audio files or swf files which can be displayed as well in the program interface.

Video Cache View offers several advantages including the ability to filter items, identify videos directly, save videos and combine the caches of multiple web browsers.

The application is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. Downloads are provided at the official Nirsoft website.

The Videoembed userscript tries to change that by turning links pointing to videos on 44 video hosting sites into embedded videos on the same page. This alteration happens directly on the page the links are posted without limiting the user experience on the site. Below is an example from Kottke.org. The first screenshot is showing the original page with the Youtube video link, the second the same page with the userscript activated.

youtube video without embed

online videos

The userscript supports many of the most popular video hosting sites, among them youtube, Metacafe, Veoh, Gametrailers, Ustream or MySpace. The script works globally and will embed the video if it is hosted on one of the supported video hosts.

The userscript works in Firefox if Greasemonkey is installed and in Google Chrome as well. It is likely that it will work in Opera and other userscript supporting browsers as well. It can be downloaded from the userscript website.

We have covered several ways to download Youtube videos in the past of which many are also compatible with other online video sites.

The portable program Web Video Cap for Windows is another alternative that has not been mentioned in the article listed above. The software is a general purpose downloader for videos. It works with many video hosting sites out there including Youtube. The main difference in comparison to most other video download tools is that Web Video Cap runs silently in the background recording videos as they are watched by the user. This is on the one hand a very comfortable way of downloading videos as zero user input is required after starting the capture mode in the software. It does on the other hand have a few disadvantages since all videos that are watched are downloaded automatically unless the capturing process is stopped by the user in Web Video Cap.

Here is how it works. Web Video Cap is a portable software program that can be run from where it has been download and unpacked. It requires the free WinPcap library which needs to be installed before startup.

The options are displayed on the screen after starting up Web Video Cap. The user needs to select the WinPCap driver as the capture method, select a save folder if the default folder is not the right one and pick the file types and streams that should be captured automatically.

We suggest to enable the option to delete downloaded files that are smaller than 100 Kilobytes to get rid of advertisements and the like automatically.

A click on the start capture button starts the monitoring of the network adapter. Online videos are automatically stored in the save folder when they are recognized by Web Video Cap. The capture can be stopped at anytime by clicking on the stop capture button.

Make sure to read the known limitations section on the developer’s website if you encounter sites that do not work with the program. Web Video Cap can be downloaded from the Nirsoft website.

Read the following before you start complaining that it surely is like all the other video search engines out there: Microsoft Live Video Search has a very interesting preview features. If you hover the mouse over a video it will play a 30 second long preview of that video in the box that was occupied by the video thumbnail.

This is an excellent way of previewing many videos in short time without having to load them on separate pages. This is not only working on video search results pages but also on single video pages when hovering over related videos.

This instant preview feature speeds up the process of finding relevant videos. There are not really any other features worth meaning, Microsoft seems to have kept it as simplistic as possible.