Movgrab For Linux

Movgrab is a free and open source command-line software project that lets users to download video streams from various video hosting services that are extremely popular these days on the Interwebs. It is a desktop-independent program that runs on virtually any GNU/Linux operating system.

It features no annoying dependencies, supports HTTP proxy servers, can be forced to run in the background, as a daemon, using the '-b' flag, displays the download progress while downloading, and can be integrated into another application.

Another interesting feature is that the software is independent from a graphical desktop environment, such as KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, MATE or Cinnamon, as it runs from a console/terminal environment.

Movgrab also supports authentication information (username and password) for downloading protected videos, prints out all the encountered web pages, can be used only in demo mode (no files will be downloaded) and runs in quiet mode without displaying the download progress or any other informative output.

The program can be configured to wait for a URL to be entered on stdin, supports resume of downloads, but only when the output is written to a single file, and allows you to specify the preferred audio and video format for video hosting services that offer multiple formats.

As mentioned, Movgrab can download video stream from major video hosting websites, including BBC IPlayer, YouTube, Metacafe, Daily Motion, Break.com, Ehow, Vimeo, Almost killed, 5min.com, IGN, DalealPlay, VBox7, Blip.tv, 3gpdb, Ted, MyVideo and Crazymotion.

The MyTopClip, RedBalcony, Berkeley University, Yale University, San Diago Natural History Museum, UChannel, Princeton University and University of California Television video hosting services are also supported by the application.

The application is written entirely in the C programming language and distributed only as a source archive, which needs to be configured and compiled prior to installation, supporting almost any Linux kernel-based operating system that runs on 64-bit or 32-bit hardware platforms.