How to download Flash movie clips

Year Two online (seminar 10/03/09)

How to download Flash movie clips

Movie clip sites such as YouTube use a format called Flash Video [file name ends .flv usually]. It is the standard format for embedded video on the web now.

The usual right click/control click and “save as” command doesn’t work on it. But you can still download these movies and play around with them/edit them, do mash-ups etc and put them on your site.

Using web sites

These web sites allow you to enter the URL (web address) of a video on YouTube, Google, DailyMotion etc and download a file of the movie.

http://keepvid.com/

http://www.downloadyoutubevideos.com/

Using some clever web coding

Here’s a slightly geeky post that shows you how to add a bookmark to your browser that will prompt YouTube to download the video as a Quicktime movie to your desktop. It works fine, though it looks a bit confusing at first. I don’t think it works for other video sharing sites.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html

Using Real Player

Real Player 11 also acts as a Flash Video downloader. It works quite well – though it downloads everything on a page, so it can be difficult to sort through the download window. You can find it here:

http://uk.real.com/player/mac/

This is a good option in that it will work on any embedded video – it’s not just coded for YouTube.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.