Many websites, such as youtube and daily motion, show videos using Flash. If you like a video enough to want to watch it later, you will find that you can’t just right-click to save the movie. One thing you can do is bookmark the page. But sometimes the video might get deleted. So it would be more convenient to save it on your hark disk.
Fortunately it is possible to save a Flash video. Your browser has to download the movie to your computer to play it. It stores it in a cache somewhere on your disk.
Saving Flash Movies with Safari Browser
With Safari, open up a new Finder window and navigate over to
/private/var/tmp/folders.50/TemporaryItems
In that folder you will see files called FlashTmp0, FlashTmp1, FlashTmp2. These are the flash files. Look for a large mult-megabyte file. Copy this file to another folder and rename it newname.flv. The flv tells the system that it is a flash movie file which can be played with a flash movie player.
I noticed that some websites automatically delete the Flash file after the movie finishes. Each time you play it your browser has to download it again. So it is best to stop the video from playing in the browser window until after you have copied the file. Just wait until it finishes downloading.
Also, don’t close the window before renaming and moving the file. The browser deletes the flash file as soon as the window is closed.
Saving Flash Movies with Firefox
Firefox appears to work the same way so do the same as for Safari.
