"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner"

For better or for worse the internet is now full of video content, from peoples' gaffes that make us laugh to serious documentaries that make us think. The king of online video is YouTube with similar services sprouting up every day (google video, myspace etc). You see videos straight in your internet explorer or firefox browser, but how do you save them to your computer so that you can watch them later at your leisure?

Try as you might you won't find a "save as" menu to save the video you just saw on your hard disk. The flash player activeX control embedded in your browser isn't going to share it with you without a fight. Obviously YouTube and co don't want you watching FLV (flash video) on your own, they want you in their website clicking on ads and other sponsored content so they can make a living. This is understandable but what if you really really want to save a video in your personal collection?

Where there's a need there's a product, and numerous programs have appeared that grab FLV from YouTube (google for "youtube downloader" and you'll find many). This is an arms race though, YouTube are constantly tweaking their content to break such unwanted automatic download attempts, the downloaders then fight back with new updates that counter the new protection measures, and so on and so forth. You can break away from this cat and mouse race though. You don't need any special software, all you need is xplorer²!

When you watch a video in internet explorer, the FLV file is downloaded and stored on your hard disk anyway. It cannot be played by remote control. But where is it? In the temporary internet files cache! So you don't need any software to download the video, all you need is a decent search engine to locate the file in your browser's cache. From there you can copy it out and enjoy it again and again.

I don't use firefox (I hear it has a plugin for downloading FLV); internet explorer stores its content in a folder called C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet Files (assuming you are using the default location). There are a lot of subfolders in there with cryptic names, so you won't find the latest video by mere inspection. In xplorer² use Tools > Find files menu command to search for *.FLV files that were modified recently. You can't preview FLV files in xplorer² yet (windows media player doesn't play them) but you can get a free FLV player for the job.

Step by step guide in today's demo video
 

ps. Dear father, RIP :(

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