On Christmas Eve, I went to NewSpring for a service that blew my mind. One of the components that I most enjoyed was the opener they used, which immediately followed praise and worship. If you are not a NewSpringer, I encourage you to watch it. Even if you don’t consider yourself Christian, or even religious, the production values alone make it worth watching.
The vocal talent is Jesse Fisher.
But that’s not the point of this post. This post is about how I got his video to show a few folks where Vimeo is blocked.
On the Vimeo page for the video above, Jesse points folks back to Kadence.tv to download the video. However, it is not there. So I began to research how to download videos from Vimeo.
On a side note, I seriously heart Vimeo.I love how they welcome me home when I stop by.
I think Vimeo has the most polished video sharing site without much of the drivel found at other sites. And yes, I know that it is possible to make a video available for download. Ethical discussions aside, here’s how I saved this video for offline viewing. Of course, I wouldn’t sell it or make a profit in any way, I simply wanted to view it offline.
Enter Vimeo Downloader script.
Through a quick search on the Google I found this script, which allows one to download Vimeo videos. I am not certain if this is the easiest way, but I tried Zamzar to no avail, and this worked. Here are the steps for making this work on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I am not sure how well it works on Windows.
1. Download the script to the Desktop.
2. Open a terminal window and enter this command: chmod u+x ~/Desktop/vimeo_downloader.sh
3. Run the following command: ~/Desktop/vimeo_downloader.sh VIDEOID
(Replace VIDEOID with the numeric code from a video URL. For example if the URL is http://www.vimeo.com/6674062 you would replace VIDEOID with 6674062).
4. Look for the downloaded video to be named VIDEOID.flv on your Desktop.
UPDATE: The author of the original post mentions this in the comments that I thought worth mentioning here:
For an easier method, try the Free Youtube user script, which places a Download link under each video (supports YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, and more):
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/34765
To use it with Firefox, first install the Greasemonkey extension:
The trouble is that user script totally changes how flash videos function in your browser. So yes, it does work to allow one to download a video, but it makes the user experience quite different. I will leave the script installed, but disabled. I’ll enable it as needed.
Interestingly, when I downloaded the file from Vimeo using the shell script, it downloaded as an .flv whereas using this Greasemonkey script it downloads as .mp4.
Update 2 (updated on November 14, 2010): The script author contacted me with an update. Here is the new link to Vimeo Downloader Script. I have also changed the links in the post.
