Not everyone has access to the internet in the same capacity.

For example, I live in a rural area that does have DSL broadband internet service however the bandwidth is severely limited due to the phone company’s infrastructure in my area and they have no plans to upgrade their equipment any time soon. The one advantage with this ISP is that there are no data overages charges with my current service as there are with many other services. In other words, I have to trade off the high speed upload/download rates to have an unlimited amount of data transfers.

What does this mean for me? At times my old dial-up internet connection was actually faster for uploads and some downloads. It is just something I have to live with since I have no plans to move any time soon either.

One thing I’ve learned to deal with is to simply download the various videos from the internet instead of trying to ‘stream’ the videos when being viewed. Yes, I have to be patient during the download process, but I can then view the videos without the constant buffering when streaming the videos.

How do I download a video from a website?

I use Real Downloader from RealTimes (formerly RealPlayer).

Is this practice ethical? Is this not considered an infringement of any copyrights?

Yes, so long as I’m only downloading the video for my own personal viewing and not for any commercial purpose. If the video is otherwise freely available for my viewing online with no limitations on the number of times I view it in the streaming mode then downloading the entire video for viewing without any buffering due to limited bandwidth is acceptable.

If I were to repost the video anywhere then it could be considered a copyright violation if not done correctly.

I will only post a link to the original source of any videos and I can embed a display of the video so long as the source file is from the original publisher of the video, such as YouTube and embedding of the video is allowed under their usage licenses. You need to check the usage license of the video source before embedding on your site, otherwise only include a link to the video on your site to protect yourself from violating any copyright laws.

Source: Michael’s WordPress Blog

Source: Michael’s WP Blog