Free Music Videos

From Mac Guides

Jump to: navigation, search

There are many websites which offer music videos online. After Apple begun selling such videos many people desired a way to get these for free. The following directions are a method of saving QuickTime movies off of AOL's Music page and saving them for later playback for the Mac and/or iPod.

Contents

[edit]

Downloading videos

[edit]

Finding the movie URL

  1. Go to AOL's music video search page
  2. Start watching the desired video in it's new window
  3. Choose View > View Source and search (Command-F) for ".mov"
  4. After a couple of results you will find a URL for the movie
[edit]

Saving the movie file

There are three methods listed here to save the movie, with the first being the simplest for users who don't have QuickTime Pro, and the last being simplest for users who do.

[edit]

Method 1

  1. Copy the entire address
  2. Open the Download window and paste
  3. The movie file will download
[edit]

Method 2

  1. Copy the entire address into a text editor
  2. Save the file as a ".html"
  3. Open in Safari
  4. Choose File > Save As...
  5. Choose a location and save the file
[edit]

Method 3 (QuickTime Pro)

This method will only work if you have a copy of QuickTime Pro. For this method, you do not need to find the movie URL (as described above). This method may not work with all music videos.

  1. Go to AOL's music video search page
  2. Start watching the desired video
  3. Wait for the movie to fully load
  4. Click on the arrow on the bottom right, which shows a menu, and select "Save QuickTime Movie..."
[edit]

Converting the videos

Once you download the videos they can be loaded into iTunes, however to use them on an iPod you must first convert them. For this method, you'll need QuickTime Pro ($30 USD), as well as VLC (free). Alternatively, you can use a freeware application called iSquint, which can do the job for you automatically.

[edit]

Unlocking

Open VLC and follow the following steps:

  1. Choose File > Open File...
  2. Choose the locked mov file and check the "Advanced Output:" checkbox
  3. In the Advanced Output settings, change the Encapsulation Mode to Quicktime
  4. In Output options, choose File and select a file by clicking Browse
  5. Change the Transcode options to 
     Video: mp4v - bitrate 512kbps scale 1
     Audio: mp4a - bitrate 128kbps channels 2
  6. Tick Play Locally if you want to watch the video as it's being encoded but it might be jerky because encoding uses a lot of processing power. Suggest you leave it off.
  7. Click OK twice, then VLC will open your file and "play it", i.e. the progress bar will start going but no video will play unless you have "play locally" on. Once it's done and has "stopped", double click on the output file you saved to open it in QuickTime. Your file will be unlocked.

You can also use this procedure to encode straight into the right format for your device if you don't have QuickTime Pro, but VLC isn't quite as customisable in terms of resizing and cropping.

[edit]

Converting formats

  • Open the video in QuickTime
  • Choose File > Export, then choose "Movie to MPEG4" for the format.
Retrieved from "http://guides.macrumors.com/Free_Music_Videos"