To find and download any Flash Video, anywhere:
Safari: Window: Activity
Look for the .flv extension, that's the flash video itself. It will be the last part of the url to where the actual flash file is stored.
Either use the url directly by copy and paste, or double click it.
If you double-click it you may end up with what looks like a bunch of jibberish text loading in your browser window, and it may take a while to load (if it's a long video, for example, it will be many MB). Just let it, then go to:
File: Save As:
... and save as text.
Rename the text file, eg:
BillyBobGoesToTheMovies.flv.txt
... by removing the .txt extension. The Finder may ask you if you really want to do this. You do, and you want to use .flv as the extension, eg:
BillyBobGoesToTheMovies.flv
Now you have the Flash video file. It will open in anything that can view it.
The other way:
Get FLVThing
here (freeware).
Get the url as above.
Launch FLVThing and enter the url. This will play but not download the file. Save if you want it on your HD. Also, if you already downloaded it as above, FLVThing will of course play it from wherever you've saved it to.
You will occassionally see some video that is in SWF format instead of FLV. This is Shockwave Video format instead of Flash Video; a little different. It will be most common when the files are smaller, eg a short swf video, perhaps a cheezy but mildy amusing
Car Ad. In this case you will find a .swf extension instead of .flv when you check out Safari's Activity window.
In this example we find this in Activity window:
Code:
http://www.youtube.com/player2.swf?video_id=RIkg0csV6YI&l=45&t=OEgsToPDskKALCKlUXRps7GvB-FqjM7r
Note: we used the "code" tag because the URL looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/player2.swf?v...Rps7GvB-FqjM7r
... if we just past it into an ehMac window; I wanted you to see the actual URL so you would recognise it in Safari's Activity window. Both URLs are identical, but look different in a Forum post.
But, you can still watch them with
SWF Movie Player, a freeware SWF viewer from commercial software vendor Eltima. It's not nearly as elegant as FLVThing, but it does work and it's the only game in town.
Although movies are not as common in SWF as FLV format, the Flash games you see online are quite commonly SWF files. You can download those games and play them offline using the same techniques.
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