also, i love safari and cURL ... and the internet ... and my patience and my brain working in conjunction to use the ingredients above to get what a want, namely, two deeply embedded flash videos on the dance studio's website, capturing me dancing salsa!! now i can watch over and over at my leisure (check my form) and show friends and family, for novelty and future reference.
just because i've got the memory of a gnat ... here's an account of how i did it.
- got the URL of page containing embedded video
- did a google search for "grab video from website" and the first result was this jackpot, explaining how to use Safari (a web browser) and cURL (a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax to download FLVs (Adobe Flash videos).
- downloaded and installed Safari for Windows
- followed the jackpot instructions above for getting the URL of the video: browsed to webpage containing the videos using Safari, then went to Window / Activity to get the URL listing of that webpage's components.
- From Safari's Activity dialog, i got the absolute paths to the flash video files that i want to grab:
http://www.[redacted].com/movie/1216group.flv
http://www.[redacted].com/movie/1216practice.flv
http://www.[redacted].com/movie/1216practice.flv
- then i downloaded and installed cURL for Windows
- and followed the jackpot instructions above for transferring files with URL syntax: from the cURL's bin directory, ran the curl utility with -o option, like this: D:\Program Files\curl1-7.19.2-devel-mingw32\bin>curl http://www.[redacted].com/movie/1216group.flv -o C:\temp\1216group.flv
did the same for the second video
- DONE!! both videos were saved to my local machine.
- then, used VLC media player to view my
stolensaved videos of me dancing salsa.
- according to wiki, FLV files can be viewed with VLC media player, Quicktime or any player which uses DirectShow filters (such as Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, and Windows Media Center) when the ffdshow filter is installed.
- then i downloaded the ffdshow filter for Windows Media Player
- i installed the ffdshow filter however i couldn't register the plug-in with Windows Media Player; FLVs could not be played. other testing required.
look for the pink scarf ~ that would be me
4 comments:
Well done on figuring out all that! There's an easier way though and that's to install DownloadHelper into Firefox.
PS. Nice moves. :)
thanks blue for the compliment. as for the kind suggestion, what makes you sure that DownloadHelper would work? just a guess?
"Using DownloadHelper, you can easily save videos from most of the popular video sites."
~~ my dance studio is hardly a popular video site so no, not easier, and, perhaps, not possible as my dance studio is not on the supported list at DownloadHelper.com
thanks though.
the safari/cURL combination probably reads like a hard procedure but it took me longer to write about it than to do it. it was easy and safari is cool. i have even considered using it to get me Mac-ready...
In my experience with DownloadHelper, only streamed RTMP protocol content couldn't be saved, such as that from the BBC's iPlayer (which was annoying as that was the principle reason I tried DownloadHelper). If a web page has an embedded FLV video, it can usually be easily saved.
Why are you thinking of going to a Mac?
i stand corrected, DownloadHelper does the job quite easily. i was convinced to try it after seeing this video tutorial. however, i quite enjoyed using the command line utility ~ it took me back a few years. :-)
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