Downloading online videos

[fizikz]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this but...

I'm trying to find how to download videos, often flash, from websites and then watch on my own time instead of waiting for the laggy video to buffer incessantly. I usually look at the page source and find the .flv or .swf files and download them directly. As a bonus I can use 'axel' command line program to speed up the download in many cases.

The problem is that sometimes the video file is not directly referenced in the source and they only have some middleman swf player/downloader in there. Is there a way to piece the info in the page source to get a direct download?

[kn0w-b1nary]

Why don't you use a firefox addon like download helper, or a site like www.savevid.com ?

[fizikz]

The addon does not work with all sites (although it does work with many!) and neither does savevid.com but both could come in pretty handy. Thanks for that info.

Still is there a way to figure this out for websites not supported by such tools? I thought reading and understanding the page source might help. It is easy when the direct link to the video file is contained in the page source, but this is not always the case.

[AndyCinDallas]

I've usually just gone into the browser cache and copy the file elsewhere.

Example - open Nautilus and go to /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/randomname.default/Cache

Sort the files by the date modified (or size - whatever helps you find the video-file itself) - then right-click and copy to another location.

[fizikz]

Thanks. It's useful to know where the browser's cache is, but if you wait for it to load in the browser, that partly defeats the purpose of being able to download the file directly. One reason is that often you can download faster with something like axel.

[AndyCinDallas]

Ah - you want to download it faster. Sorry, I thought you just wanted to save the file itself, because I've noticed that playing videos inside Firefox eg YouTube, etc is a lot more laggy (even once it's finished) than just playing the movie natively, so that's what I do on an older machine.

[fizikz]

Yes I do want to download it faster, not because I intend to keep the video, but because many times some sites are slow and cause the video to buffer a lot, making it a pain to watch online. Letting it load takes an eternity and sometimes just fails on some sites (for watching TV shows for example). I find that with 'axel' it gets downloaded several times faster and I can actually watch the video uninterrupted.

[iMARUF]

try ClipGrab http://clipgrab.de/en

[matt_symes]

Old thread. Closed.