On Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:19:37 +0000, John Stumbles wrote:
When I want to grab a copy of a flash video I keep my browser on the page
with the video in it (as if I were going to play it again) and look in my
temporary directory for the saved copy of the file. On my Linux systsem
that's easy: it's in /tmp and usually called FlashXYZABC or something
obvious like that, and also has a very recent timestamp.

Yep - what I normally do is kick the video off downloading and then do
'ls -l /tmp/Fl*' a couple of times so I can see which file is actually
being written to. Either wait until the filesize stops increasing, or the
progress bar has finished in the video player within the browser, then
copy / convert.

Youtube seem to be using a new flv format lately which trips up some
of the players (but still works with the embedded Adobe players) - I've
found that ffplay will handle them fine, but mplayer won't. I suspect
mplayer will catch up eventually.