Grandmother will trade Pot Roast for Political Roast

October 17, 2008 12:37 PM

My grandmother wants to watch Obama and McCain in the Smith dinner again (and again!) She has dialup internet, and is about as net savvy as one would expect. Can the hivemind help?

I just talked to my 80 year old grandmother and she was tickled at the jokes from the Senators in the roast last night. She liked that the humor was clean and self deprecating and a nice break from all the campaign negativity. (She's a sweetheart, my gran). She says she wishes she could see them again and watch them from time to time. They're on YouTube, but her internet is slow; I think she'd be better watching on a DVD or at least as a file on her computer.
Any ideas? Do they sell these things on DVD? Is it available for download?
Other info:
She has a Mac. I have a PC and cable internet.
I am in no hurry, though I am driving to her state tonight to visit.
Disclaimer: This question should not be construed to mean that I would even dream of violating copyright law to make a lovely old lady happy.

posted by pointystick to technology (7 answers total)

I think she should use keepvid.com to download the clips and store them on the hard drive as FLV files... then she can use VLC Media Player anytime to view them locally.
posted by crapmatic at 12:44 PM on October 17, 2008

where do you live? if by chance you live in nyc, NY1 has been repeating MANY clips all day.
posted by alice ayres at 12:48 PM on October 17, 2008

I think you should download them for her, burn them to DVD, and give it to her in person (since you're driving there anyway). This will be a lot faster and less frustrating then trying to walk her through it over dial-up.
posted by desjardins at 1:23 PM on October 17, 2008

You can buy it from C-SPAN on DVD for $30. http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=281814-1. Or just watch the Flash version again and again.
posted by GuyZero at 1:33 PM on October 17, 2008

If she uses keepvid she should save them as mp4. Flv files are a pain, even with VLC.

On preview: I agree with desjardins.
posted by nooneyouknow at 1:40 PM on October 17, 2008

If you read the instructions carefully this should get you what you want and give you something that will play in QuickTime.
posted by mandal at 1:52 PM on October 17, 2008

I like the Video DownloadHelper Firefox extension for jobs like this.

Something else that can work well for dialup users is setting the Firefox cache to huge (like, 2000MB) instead of the default 50MB (Preferences/Options -> Advanced -> Network -> Cache). Then, if you put Firefox into Work Offline mode from the File menu, you'll find that just about any page in your browsing history can be revisited and will Just Work. If I remember correctly, this includes YouTube videos.
posted by flabdablet at 7:22 PM on October 17, 2008