In three easy steps, you can rip flash video from a good majority of tv station websites.
Ethically this may be out of bounds. Well, it depends on your relationship with local agencies, and of course the end-use of the videos in question.
My use is limited. Often we’ll want to collect and catalog our media hits for internal use in presentations and powerpoints.
My current method.
1. Go to the website or page where the video clip is displayed. The large majority deploy flash video players and the .flv format.
2. View Source. Find the url for the .flv file.
3. Paste the flv video url into the converter tool at vixy.net.
And you’re done. You can choose from several output formats.
Just trying to spread the wealth. This method has saved me alot of time.
Another alternative is using screen capture software to rip straight from your monitor to a video file, but I’ve yet to find something that captures the audio very well.
April 24th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Try the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox–http://www.downloadhelper.net/–works a treat for saving .flv files. I then use MPEG Streamclip to convert to another format if needed - great for converting HQ YouTube clips to .mp4 for iPhone, or to AVI, or any flavor of QuickTime.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
I like to use Safari’s Activity window to monitor what stream is going through and paste that into Safari’s Downloads window. An example:
http://webrevolutionary.com/use-safaris-activity-window-to-save-web-files/
But that method isn’t limited to YouTube alone. It works for everything but streaming video, e.g. Hulu, and I think the only way to capture that is using screencast technology. It’s also better than hunting for a “.flv” because the HTML from the Dreamweaver Flash Video player removes the file extension and leaves you with something like:
<param name="FlashVars" value="&MM_ComponentVersion=1&skinName=videos/skins/Halo_Skin_3&streamName=i_am_a_video_file&autoPlay=false&autoRewind=true" />
I’m not sure which screen capturing software you don’t like, but I used Snapz Pro X for a long time; however I like ScreenFlow more each time I use it.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:57 am
these are great suggestions. thanks Tim and Rich.