If you've not yet seen a TED talk, you're missing out on a treat. Their byline -- "Riveting talks by remarkable people" -- is true, with subject matter as diverse as their speakers. Whether it's Naomi Klein talking about our addiction to risky enterprises, Thomas Thwaites trying to build a toaster from scratch or the late Denis Dutton describing his Darwinian theory of beauty, I've yet to find one that doesn't measure up.

Talks typically last 10-20 minutes making them ideal bite-size info updates, but there's one catch: you can't download them.

Actually that's not quite true. Here's a quick how-to:

Getting the lot

metaTED is a tool that creates metalinks (links to links) of TED talks, grouping them by encoding quality (high or low), and by theme, author and year. You'll need a download client that supports metalinks (list here). I used the Firefox extension DownloadThemAll.

1. After installation it's simply a clicking on the desired metaTED link and choosing to use DownloadThemAll.





2. You'll be asked where you want to save the files...





3. Then you'll be presented with a selection list...





4. Clicking Start at this point will begin downloading the lot in groups of four.



Note! There are hundreds of talks in the full list, so you may want to be selective. You do so either at Step 3 or Step 4. The latter is easier as you can use Shift + click and Ctrl + click on whole blocks of files.

Getting individual talks

More often than not however, you just want to download an individual talk. Again, you can use metaTED.

Let's say we're looking for Christopher McDougall's talk entitled "Are we born to run?".

1. Go to the metaTED page and click the desired link, but this time choose to save the actual file.



This will download a .metalink file -- an XML file that can be examimed in any text editor.



2. Open it in your favourite editor and search for either the presenter or title.

<file name="Christopher McDougall - Are we born to run.mp4">   <resources>     <url type="http">http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/10719/talk/1067</url>   </resources> </file>

You can see the actual  download link there, sandwiched between the <url type="http"> and the </url>.



3. Here Linux users have it easy as wget is installed by default. Windows users will have to download it.

In a console, type the command wget followed by the link name:

wget http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/10719/talk/1067



Once the download's finished, you'll find a file named (in this case) "1067". You may want to rename it something more meaningful and give it a valid extension -- all TED files are .mp4  format -- but it'll play just as it is in VLC
.


What great TED Talks have I missed? Add your favourites in a comment!