Re: FLV Video Capture and Player

[Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxx]

Before Robert's YouTube grabber I had been plucking FLV files from my
browser's temp folders, and playing them using the Miro player
(originally the Democracy player). Both techniques were fairly
unsatisfactory. Miro is way too much app for the (mostly) low quality
clips, and fishing around in the temp folders is tedious...and if you're
not quick about it the files disappear (another of the tricks to keep
people from capturing them).

You might be interested to know, Robert...once I became aware that such
a thing existed, I went looking for other FLV sets like yours. The first
two I found were very similar...but didn't work! The capture modules
would only download empty files, and the players were very buggy. I'll
just stick with yours. Thank you.

-BrianH.

-----Original Message----- From: J R FOX

> Only problem: YouTube doesn't want you to
> capture (copy to hard disk) their videos!

Nor do many other sites, and they go to some lengths
to make it extremely difficult. As you pointed out,
one often would first need to hunt down the real
location of the video with a URL sniffer, then paste
that into something that is capable of grabbing it.
There are sites that claim to do this for you, and
some browser plugins that haven't impressed me, so
far. The effectiveness of all this varies, and some
variety of tools may need to be employed, depending on
the video format, of which there are many. I'm just
beginning to get into this, and have previously tried
a few things that either don't work, work in rather
limited cases, or don't work very well. But there are
quite a few others I have yet to try. It would likely
be unreasonable and unrealistic to expect any single
tool to cover it all.

Even with just FLV, there is content I would like to
acquire from Atom Films, and other places. With WMV,
they have this nice trick of splitting the clip into a
.DAT file and some other file, if one tries to get it.
 Some of the news sites do this. I think *you* might
be able to reassemble the pieces to where the clip was reconstituted and
watchable, but this is beyond the reach of most. That may leave only
attempting to record it -- as it streams to you -- using one of the
desktop recorder programs, which I think amounts to a lower quality
"xerox."