A manual method
The most common way to grab your favourite video from Youtube, Metacafe, and any video streaming network is to go to a link grabbing website or to use a link grabbing software. I agree with that, as it’s pretty easy and just a click away. But what can you do if you have already streamed a video online and you want to download it with ‘not’ wasting your time?
Ok. I have a simple trick that anyone can use to grab any kind of streaming media. When you play a online media, it actually gets downloaded in your ‘temporary internet files folder’. Finding it in the ‘temporary internet files’ folder could be a little work for you, depending on the browser you.used as the file may be downloaded with a blank extention i.e ‘video’ and ‘music’ and not ‘video.flv’ or ‘music.mp3’. Anyway, you ‘can’ distinguish the cached files by selecting the ‘Detailed view’ and arranging the icons by ‘Modified’ in the internet cache folder and with this you can find the most recent cache with the largest size. Now, try playing the file with the largest size on your FLV format supported player. If it plays, then you are done and copy the file to a safe destination! If not, then try playing the next largest file and you will surely get what you are looking for. The trick might sound complicated, but it’s not at all!
Following are the steps for Firefox and Internet Explorer:
Firefox users (Windows XP):After streaming the online video, go to
- My Computer>
- Your Windows Destination Drive>
- Documents and settings>
- Unhide the hidden folders>
- Open the user folder (if you are logged in to windows with name “Blahblah” then open the “Blahblah” folder)>
- Local Settings>
- Application Data>
- Mozilla>
- Firefox>
- Profiles>
- Select the recently created folder, mostly located on the extreme right >
(click to enlarge)
- Cache >
- Arrange icons with ‘Modified’>
- Try playing the most recent cach file in your FLV supported player>
- Copy the video to the safe destination!
Internet Explorer
Interesting points on web grabbers, I use python for simple html web grabbers, but for larger projects i used extractingdata.com web grabber which worked great, they build quick custom web grabber and web scraper programs
Hi Laura, I went through extractingdata.com and it’s much better than the conventional ways to grab embedded data. Thanks for bringing it to my notice. I will post an article on it soon.