Program name: Clive
Platforms: Unix like operating systems. It’s already in the Ubuntu repositories!
Project website: clive.sourceforge.net
How to install in Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install clive

The new video sharing websites like Youtube, Google Video have wealth information such as tutorials, but saving them to your hard drive can be a time consuming. While there are lots of tools for downloading videos from video sharing websites, clive is probably the most useful of them.

Clive is a command line too, so its always ready to go whenever you have a terminal open (for me that is all the time). Also, clive does not just grab the “.flv” file, but it automatically converts it to the “.mp4” format which is a lot easier to play. As near as I can tell, it does this conversion without any noticeable quality loss. Finally, clive and do some command line tricks like queuing up a batch of videos to download.

The syntax for using clive is very simple:
clive options http://url/to/page/video/is/on

Most of the time you don’t even need any options so the command is simply:
clive http://url/to/page/video/is/on

Clive is smart enough to be able to login to sites like Youtube if the video you are downloading requires it. This done by use of a configuration file and is well documented on Clive’s man page. As near as I tell, sites currently supported by Clive are: Youtube, GoogleVideo, SevenLoad, Break, Liveleak, and EvisorTv. The developer is currently accepting patches if you want to add support for another site.