Circumventing Animoto

I'm not all that thrilled about the re-designing of Animoto.  Dropping the "shared" videos tab makes a teacher's life  harder--I liked being able to just scroll through that to watch/grade my student's videos.  Worse, I've now lost access to all the past videos that I used for demonstrations, since they've locked down the site so you can no longer search through other users' public videos.  What's up with that, Animoto???

My internet connection here in Borneo is not the best; it can take forever to log on, and once you're on, it repeatedly kicks you off.  Not good for a 50 minute presentation highly dependent on online videos and tools.  I've been frantically trying to "internet proof" the workshop the last few nights:  I downloaded the Prezi, took screenshots of the apps (Animoto and Myna) in case they're not working, and downloaded the Animoto videos.  That's where I hit the troublespot:  Two of my examples were from my last school, and since they're not in my account, I can't download them (though, fortunately, I had links, so could still access them!)

I tried using Video Download Helper (a Firefox add-on) to download the booktrailer, but that doesn't work on Animoto anymore.  After trying a couple other tools, I finally found Real Player SP for Mac.  It's a quick download, then

• Open the program, go to File>Open Location, add the URL and wait for RP to load the page.
•  In the meantime, go to Window>Open RealPlayer Downloader.
• Back in the RealPlayer window, click play for the video, which will open it in Downloader, with a download button. Click that, and you're good to go!