This may be of interest to someone:

I used to have Real Player installed on my XP machine, solely for using the 'Download Video' facilty for YouTube Videos. It worked OK until recently but for some reason, now, the flv files produced by this method started behaving oddly. Using the XP Task Manager I could watch the CPU usage and as soon as Real Player had finished downloading the file, the CPU would go to 100% and stay there! Looking at 'Processes', it appeared that Windows Explorer was using about 98% of the CPU and the only way out of this situation was to shut down and re-boot.

Even stranger - just using Explorer to 'point' at the downloaded flv files would cause the same behaviour and, again a reboot was required. Trying to delete the offending files - with great difficulty as the system had slowed to a virtual stop - indicated that they were in use by another process. <deleted>! I could use 'Unlocker' to delete the files on the next boot, which I did.

Interestingly, flv files from previous downloads still behaved OK so I reckoned that something was wrong with Real Player. Strangely though, I had no problem playing these 'problem' flv files using VLC or Gnome Player under Linux.

OK, I immediately thought 'Malware / Virus' although Avira and Malwarebytes found nothing amiss. No real help that I found on the Internet so I decided to totally remove Real Player from the system. Everything behaved OK after this but, of course, I had to find another way of downloading flv files from YouTube. I found a plug-in for Google Chrome - YouTube Downloader - and this works OK. The flv files that it produces are problem-free. CPU usage returns to a low level after the download ends.

So, problem solved - except that the Google plug-in only works on YouTube and not on other sites. The same plug-in works under Linux, by the way.

Anyway, as the title of this post suggests, is there a similar Plug-in available for IE8? I primarily use Chrome as my browser but still sometimes use IE and a download utility would be useful. I'm aware of sites where you can post a video URL and have the download performed remotely but I'm not too keen on this approach. Paranoid maybe!

I've no idea really what was causing the original problem - maybe some strange interaction with RP, caused by an XP update. This wouldn't really surprise me as I've has MS mess things up before with their recommended updates!

So, any comments or suggestions for plug-ins for IE - or Chrome for that matter?

Sorry if this post is a bit long and maybe confusing - just reflects my confusion over the whole affair!

DM

Been trying a few plug-ins to IE8 but haven't been satisfied with them.

Just recently I've started using a standalone app instead, Streamtransport.

Granted, not as transparent, and you do need to load up the page in Streamtransport.

However so far it's been downloading video files from whatever sites I've thrown at it.