I am sure that many of you have used a Youtube or similar video from a tube channel in the classroom and thought 2 things.  'Wouldn't it be good if I could download and keep this somewhere?" and "Is there something I could do to clean up this crappy quality video?"  The answer to both of these questions is yes.

Savevideo.me  allows you to simply drop in the URL of any video page and it will download it as a .flv video file straight to your desktop.   Realplayer SP is still the best I have seen - after you install the free version it will automatically just give you the option to download any audio or video stream within your browser.  It then instantly gives you the option to convert it to a number of formats.

Once you have your sometimes grainy and poor quality video saved you might want to take a look at Vreveal - this little pearler simply does some amazing things to shaky and grainy videos to dramatically improve them.  This one offers a free 30 day trial but is very cheap to purchase if it meets your needs.  This is what the FBI use to identify people in crowds on CCTV. 

Would love to hear your thoughts