The Song Fight Bulletin Board

#1. Is it possible to download or save a Flash video to my computer? Like something from youtobe, etc.
Does it require a special program of some sort?

#2. Which format is best to make a video in if it is going to be posted on a free hosting site like youtube? avi, mpeg 1, mpeg 2, wmv?

I've found that changing formats kills the vid quality.

In Vista, as long as you have real player, the option to download videos pops up at the top of the flash screen. Just clik on it and it downoads to disk.

It may be a real player thing of a Vista thing..


Works tho

Just install klite codec pack (google it) then, after watching a youtube video or whatever, fish the .flv out of your internet cache. (just drag and drop it to your desktop or whatever) The codec pack allows you to play FLV in windows media player.

There are a bunch of Flash-grabbers for Mac or Win, and also a Mozilla plug in for FireFox. Google is your friend. My wife grabs lots of videos for her speech pathology clinical work. I'll post some links later from home.

sometimes you can fish the location of the flash file out of the source of the page you're viewing it on.

jb wrote:sometimes you can fish the location of the flash file out of the source of the page you're viewing it on.

I used to do it this way almost every time.

Cool, thanks guys. I'm running XP, but I never thought of fishing the file from my cache. Ha, like cache of the day. kill me now

I've been grabbing bits from the net for little videos I'm messing with. I found some cool sites with art, clips and vids with creative commons tags, but they are all flash. You would think that if a site has public domain tuff, they'd offer a D/L tag or something.

Here's a cool trick that works in the Safari browser, the Apple-Option-A command key sequence will open an activity window that shows you whats going on in that webpage. Look for a line like this:

http://mia-v64.mia.youtube.com/get_vide ... kES9KM7K9k

The "get_video?video_id" sequence is what your looking for (in fact if you click the link, you can download it), double click it and it will be downloaded to your download location. Use iSquint to convert it to whatever. iSquint is also good for making iPod or TV optimized movies.