A lot of people want to save Flash videos to their hard drive, but aren’t sure how. A while back I was teaching at a school, and the administrator had blocked YouTube. This post will describe the necessary steps to save these videos. As a heads up, you will need will probably need to install some software.
As a disclaimer, I am not a legal expert and I don’t know the latest copyright laws. I am only putting this describing this technique, and I suggest that you only download videos that you know aren’t copyrighted, such as home movies your friends might have made.
Step 1
First you need to download the file to your machine. There are several websites that do this, including SaveTube or KeepVid. Copy the link from your browser of the video file that you want into the dialog box and click download. Next, click the link that pops up below and download the video file. It will have a .flv extension.
Step 2
Chances are that you don’t have a Flash player on your computer. You can download the free VLC Media Player to view Flash videos. I has binaries for various operating systems.
Step 3
Suppose that you want to be able to put the videos in more robust formats, such as an MPEG. I found the answer on this ViDEOHelp.com Forum Post. In summary, you can use RivaFLVencoder to convert .flv files to .avi or .mpg files. The post goes into detail on how to convert the Flash videos, but it’s relatively easy. I have only managed to convert files to a .mpg. Whenever I tried converting it to an .avi, there would be sound without video. Other users ran into similar issues.
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