French video portal Dailymotion is ditching the use of proprietary plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight for its "pré bêta" Dailymotion site. Instead, the open video site is exploring the possibilities offered by HTML 5 and the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5.

Firefox 3.5, which is now a very stable beta, is faster than earlier versions, and most importantly, it embraces open-source video standards and treats videos like web pages (you can’t do any of that with Flash). If this takes off, Flash video could become history.

clive is an open source command line tool to extract videos and to bypass the need to use Adobe Flash in order to view user-generated content available on video-sharing websites. Clive supports Youtube, GoogleVideo, Dailymotion, metacafe, Guba, Sevenload, Myvideo. Clive converts the downloaded Flash Video into a MP4 file avoiding the need of having a Flash Video Player.

"With video streaming site Dailymotion offering the free Ogg Theora video format, FSF urges other video sites to follow..."

Apple and Microsoft join to fight Opera and Firefox. The next big evolution of the Internet will be in the realm of video playing. Until now the rapid growth of online video has been built on Adobe's Flash technology. Flash has always been a workable solution but not the best platform because it requires an additional plugin to be installed before users can view video.

ClipGrab is a free GUI Video downloader from the famous online video sharing websites like youtube, veoh, Dailymotion, MyVideo and many other. ClipGrab is very simple (basically just one window to work on). Clipgrab downloads the file and saves it by default to FLV (Flash Video) however can convert the downloaded video on the fly to Windows Video (WMV), MPEG4, MP3 (Audio), OGG Vorbis (Audio).

"...Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools..."

DamnVid is a cross-platform application to download and convert videos from your hard drive or from dozens of video sharing websites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Veoh, Metacafe, etc. Basically, it's a video downloader and converter that sucks less.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).