Saving Flash Videos In Linux
This guest article was written by Nate from The Geeky Life blog, who is also one of our most prolific forum members. Thanks!
Have you ever watched a video on Youtube or some other site that lets you view flash videos and then wanted to save a copy of the video to your hard drive so that you can watch it later,out but you then cannot because there is no download link? This can be done very easily because when you watch a video on any of those sites they save a temporary file on your computer of the video. So from there you will need to just find the file and rename it.
So the first thing you are going to want to do is go to the site with the video that you want to download. Once you are there you will have to wait for the video to fully load so that you will have all of the video when you make a copy of it later.
You Can Tell When The Video Is Fully Downloaded When The Light Red Bar Is At The End Of The Box
Now from here you will need to navigate to Filesystem/tmp. Now you will just need to find a file that has “flash” in the name of it. In my case it is FlashZv9s8f yours should be something similar. From here you will just need to copy and paste the file to where ever you want it and then rename it to whatever you want with the file extension .flv so in the end mine was “FlashZv9s8f.flv”.
The Original Version And The Copied Version
To play the flash movies on your computer you can use VLC Player. In most versions of Linux you can find VLC pre-installed or in your package manager.
Flash Video Playing In VLC
Now you are done and you can download all of the flash videos that you want onto your hard drive.
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youtube-dl will do it all automagically
http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/
At long last! A linux article!
Thanks!
Excellent post
foregive me if this is stupid question but i dont no the answer, is the above possible in Windows? If so wear should i look? – Thanks
I’m aware that there are programs out there that do it for you but I kinda like the idea of having it already on your hard drive and just finding it yourself … dont really want to install another app ….
This is easily done, cross-platform with Video Download Helper Firefox extension.
@fhunter the point of the article was so that you don’t have to use any external resources. Because that site that you posted along with a bunch of others can do the same thing but you then have to go to those sites to preform the same thing that you can do locally
Thanks, always great when you take up linux stuff!
Hi HTG,
That’s exactly how you do it in Linux!
Thank you, Nate.
I used Download Helper before it was “upgraded” to the current, so-called Video_Download_Helper – it worked like a charm. But like so many other things that get upgraded, it suddenly quit working and, while it would indicate that a file was successfully downloading, it would render an empty folder.
It makes the information here especially valuable to me.
Next, maybe you could cover why Flash Video simply quits working altogether in Ubuntu, eh? (Mysteries abound in the world of Linux).
Yes but how do i do it in windows?? anyone??
James, just surf to the firefox web and search for a Firefox addon for downloading Youtube movies.
/Mats
Nice post. I’m using DownloadHelper plugin with Firefox. Try it here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006
With this, you don’t have to wait till the video gets loaded fully to your browser and get it saved in to your temp directory, instead place the download, close the browser and watch it while downloading it to dwhelper directory. Enjoy
Great article. First thing I thought about using this for would be to maybe get around MegaVideo’s 72 minute time limit. Not sure if it will work.
Also, I started a youtube video and renamed the file to an .flv extension before the video had finished loading on youtube. After the video fully loaded on youtube I had the whole video in the tmp folder.
It also seems that if I start a video, immediately move it before it’s loaded all the way, then rename it to the .flv extension I still get the whole video. The file slowly gets bigger as more of the video is loaded on youtube. So it follows the file and seems to continuously download which is why I thought of the MegaVideo time limit thing. If you download the whole file locally while watching it, what will make the video stop at 72 minutes?
I downloaded a video through both firefox download helper addon and using the tmp method in this article. Both worked but I could only play the tmp video in Ubuntu’s totem movie player.
VLC gave this error: “No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format “undf”. Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.”
The tmp video was also .8 Mb smaller and used H.264/AVC Video codec vs download helper which used Sorenson Video. Also the tmp video used AAC audio vs mp3.
sorry for the long comment. Cool idea with a lot of possibilities. Man, I love Linux.
I use this trick with Firebug
http://www.infonomada.com/soft.....n-firebug/
(spanish)
Follow up comment.
If you don’t let the video load all the way, rename it, and watch it as it downloads, it comes out as H.264/AVC Video codec with AAC audio codec and you can only watch it through Totem Movie Player(which sucks at fastforwarding and rewinding). If you do let it load all the way then rename it you get Sorenson Video codec with Mp3 audio and can use the more awesome and better VLC.
I’m not really sure about the quality difference between the codecs, but both seem about the same.
Firefox + Flashgot + kget/gwget
With FlashGot extension for FF this procedure takes just 2 clicks…
Thanks! This works even with Javascript-based links to .flv files. Just what I needed.
@ James
You should be able to find it within your browsers cache.
Or use a plugin as already mentioned.
This appears to be a copy an article by Mitch Frazier originally published on 21st January 2009 in the Linux Journal. http://www.linuxjournal.com/vi.....lash-video
@rrp
The link that you posted is to a video… this is clearly a written article and not a copy of anything.
This article is simply detailing a very common technique that has been used and written about by many others for years.
This technique works under any os not just linux, it’s just a matter of understanding that to display any remote content locally, it has to be retrieved. It usually lives in browser cache or temporary folders. (windows user may have to rely on unlocker to copy the file).
But this method is certainly not a true way of downloading flash video, as you have to have flash plugin and go to the actual website and wait for the video to stream in its entirety.
There are tools that allow to download these videos such as clive (http://clive.sourceforge.net/) or websites such as http://vixy.net
Another thing I’ll often do is make a link as in
ln /tmp/Flashblah ~/thevid.flv
important thing is not to use a symlink (ln -s) though this means it need to be on the same block device, but now if you accidentally close it after it’s loaded, but before saving it’ll still be there. Links are very awesome – like having multiple copies of the same file without any additional space. No matter which one you delete the others remain. Though once you delete the last one the file is really gone.
Cheers,
Alan.
Question: “Yes but how do i do it in windows?? anyone??”
Answer: Install Linux.
‘Question: “Yes but how do i do it in windows?? anyone??”‘
‘Answer: Install Linux.’
+1! Couldn’t agree more. Linux has definitely made my maintenance workload plummet.
@James: You would do well to give a desktop-oriented Linux distro a try. Ubuntu is a very good choice. So is Debian, ever since the slick GUI installer a couple of years ago. A Latin American family I know has been on Kubuntu for just over a year now. They do everything with it–videos, IM, iPod, MySpace/Facebook, etc. with no fuss, and in two languages.
Now, for downloading videos from YouTube, I use a GPL’d script called “youtube-dl” that some kind soul wrote (just Google for it). It’s written in Python and is very easy to use. Adobe Flash *NOT* required for using it, either! I download the videos with youtube-dl, and then I just use my favorite video player–usually MPlayer or VLC–to watch them.
–SYG
Congratulations and thanks for this post. Just what I was looking for: A way to download flash videos without installing more stuff.
Great article. You show how saving Flash videos is less complicated than people make it seem to be.
I liked this so much I made a script for it. Pretty much the script will let you know if there is no video in your /tmp, or if there is more than one it opens the /tmp folder so you can pick the one you want. Otherwise it just opens a box with zenity to let you name it.
#!/bin/bash
count=$(ls /tmp/Flash* | wc -l)
function cancel
{
if [ "$?" = 1 ]; then
exit 1
fi
}
if [ "$count" = 0 ]
then /usr/bin/zenity –error –title=”ERROR!” –text=”There is no video saved in your /tmp directory. Please wait until it is completely saved.”
exit 1
elif [ "$count" != 1 ]
then /usr/bin/zenity –error –title=”ERROR!” –text=”There are two or more instances of a flash video in your /tmp directory, Nautilus will now open. Please select the video you want to save.”
nautilus /tmp/
else
name=$(/usr/bin/zenity –entry –title=”Name your Video” –height=100 –width=300 –text=”Please name your video “)
cancel
cp /tmp/Fla* ~/Videos/”$name”
fi