How do I make RealPlayer the default player in Chrome? I’m using Chrome
version 22.0 and when I play a YouTube video, it uses Adobe Flash player. I
want to use RealPlayer so I can download some of the videos. Thanks for your
help.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #68, I look at the possibilities of using a local program to play
online YouTube flash videos.
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Playing YouTube videos in RealPlayer
You can’t. The bottom line is that YouTube videos are in fact flash videos.
They require Flash Player to play the videos. If you’re using an HTML 5-based
browser, they may use some other encoding that is native to the browser. But
in either case, regardless, you do not have the opportunity or the option of
switching out to a different player like Real Player.
Real Player plays a completely different file format.
Downloading YouTube videos
Now, the real problem that you’re trying to solve here is you want to
download some of the videos.
That may in fact be against YouTube’s terms of service. I will let you at
least be aware of that when I tell you then that you can search for tools
that are called “YouTube downloaders.”
What they will download when they download a video from YouTube is an .flv
file; FLV stands for Flash video. In other words, you’ll need a flash video
player or software capable of playing flash videos (like Video Lands, VLC) in
order to play these videos because fundamentally, they’re flash.
You need something that understands flash in order to play Flash
videos.
I’ve been using RealPlayer for years, to download-and-play YouTube videos. Hence, I don’t understand your problem. The latest free-RealPlayer plays FLV and many other formats.
10-Nov-2012
I don’t have have any problems with RealPlayer, just like Deano Hopper. Make sure the Real download and recording is checked in the preferences option. I’m using the standard Realplayer.
You could download an . flv file and convert it to .whatever using any of the many free converters.
Wow! there I paid for replay media catcher/splitter/converter which I thought was good. But I never new realplayer could do more than just play. So I may reinstall if I don’t reload somthing else.
Also there is a file converter with free RealPlayer. E g WMV and Apple 264.
I used to have a Chrome extension that automatically provided links for download of FLV, MP4 and MOV format of any YouTube video. Unfortunately, a recent update of Chrome killed the extension and it is no longer available.
As for the best video player, I go with VLC. There is no better player out there. It’s free and available for most platforms.
If I remember correctly, Real software used to have issues with spyware or something like that. Have they changed things in the many years since I stopped using RealPlayer and RealJukebox?
I’ve been using it for seven years without any problems.
You can use RealPlayer software to download videos from the internet, including YouTube videos. You need to enable (if it isn’t enabled already) “Web Downloading And Recording”. That can be accessed by clicking the upper left corner of Real Player’s player window (where the Real Player logo is) and clicking preferences. Then on the left side at the bottom of the menu is “Downloading & Recording”. Click that and make sure the downloading option is checked. Close all that out and try going to a video, hovering your mouse over the video window and a small window in the upper right corner of the video window should pop up momentarily saying “Download this video” with the Real Player logo. Click that and the video will download. I’m using Windows 7, so Real Player puts the video in the videos folder under Real Player Downloads (I’m not sure where it puts it if you are running XP). From there you can access the video. Hope this helps. One final note; Firefox is my browser of choice, but Real’s downloader doesn’t work with it very well, so I fire up Internet Explorer to grab the video. I haven’t tried it using Chrome.