Well here we see how to install and use Clipgrab on Linux Mint 20.1, Ubuntu 21.04 / 20.4 / 18.04 including Debian, Elementary OS, Kali, MX Linux and others. Also learn the steps to create your desktop shortcut.
Clipgrab is a graphics program that can be used to download videos from online media platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion or Facebook etc. and convert them if you want (e.g. to MP3, OGG Vorbis / Theora or WMV). It’s really convenient because if you don’t need video and are interested in its audio, save the media file as MP3. For the conversion, FFmpeg is used in the background.
Its interface is quite clean and simply designed that does not require any guide to understand, even for beginners. Besides Linux, Clipgrab is available for Windows and Mac OS X and is licensed under GPL3. The best thing is that you can search for videos using keywords on Clipgrab if you don’t have the URL of a particular video.
ClipGrab can automatically download videos when a video link is found in the clipboard. It is also possible to use a proxy server.
Install and Clipgrab on Linux Mint 20.1
1. Run the system update
It is not necessary, but just make sure the system is using the latest security updates, run it.
sudo apt update
2. Install dependencies – FFmpeg & Python 2
To convert videos using Clipgrab we need FFmpeg on our system and to allow the software to search Youtube or other videos we also need to install python 2 on Linux Mint.
sudo apt install ffmpeg
By default python 3 will be there, however, we need python 2, so run the command below, it will automatically select python-is-python2 instead of python.
sudo apt install python
3. Download Clipgrab for Linux mint 20.1
Clipgrab is available in APP Image format and can therefore be run on any Linux system, regardless of its base or code. Therefore, we first download the same, and then we will see how to use it.
Visit the official Clipgrab page to download the AppImage- file Here is the link. Select the Linux binary.
4. Move the YouTube download file to a safe location
By default, the file will be in your Downloads folder because we got it from the browser. But there are chances that we accidentally delete it, so let’s move it to a safe place.
cd Downloads sudo mv ClipGrab-*-x86_64.AppImage /opt/clipgrab.AppImage #Download logo wget https://www.how2shout.com/linux/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/clipgrab.png sudo cp clipgrab.png /opt/
5. Create a desktop and Cligrab application launch shortcut
Let’s create a desktop shortcut for this Youtube downloader so that we can easily access it on Linux Mint.
nano ~/Desktop/Clipgrab.desktop
Copy the entire block of text below and paste it into the file.
Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Type=Application Name=ClipGrab Comment=Download and convert videos from various portals (e.g. YouTube) Exec=/opt/clipgrab.AppImage Icon=/opt/clipgrab.png Categories=Application;Network Terminal=false
Save the file by pressing g- Ctrl + X, type Yes, then press the Enter Key.
Too, copy the shortcut to Applications folder, so that we can access it from the launcher.
sudo cp ~/Desktop/Clipgrab.desktop /usr/share/applications
Now, you will have it on the application launcher
in addition, also make the shortcut on the desktop executable, to do this, right click on it, select Properties >> Authorizations tab, and select the “Allow the file to run as a program” box.
6. Run Clipgrab on Linux Mint
Finally using shortcuts run this youtube video downloader and use keyword or url to download videos.
See also another lightweight Snap Video downloader – Lightweight Video Downloader for Linux Mint 20.1
7. Remove or uninstall
To remove this video downloader platform, just delete the files we have downloaded and created so far:
sudo rm -r /opt/clipgrab.AppImage sudo rm -r /opt/clipgrab.png sudo rm -r /usr/share/applications/Clipgrab.desktop