Downloading Streaming Videos

Does anyone know how I can do this without specialised programmes? Eg. YouTube downloader would be specialised for YouTube and so on and so forth. I don't really care if it takes longer or is more complex, just so long as it's usable.

So, is there perhaps one programme that can download streaming videos from a multitude of sites? My common sense tells me that there should be because obviously if it's streaming to your computer it will be downloading in some form no matter what site you use. So it makes sense that there should be something out there that 'captures' this download once it gets to your PC, instead of having to have a relationship with the website it originally comes from.

Is this possibleh?

any streaming content will be downloaded to your temp directory
/tmp on *nix
windows, don't know off hand

just pause the video, wait for the whole thing to download, and copy the temporary file

there are various tricks that sites can do that make this slightly harder to do (eg. multiple temp files strung together)

but bottom line is any streaming content is there on your machine

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ynot

any streaming content will be downloaded to your temp directory
/tmp on *nix
windows, don't know off hand

just pause the video, wait for the whole thing to download, and copy the temporary file

there are various tricks that sites can do that make this slightly harder to do (eg. multiple temp files strung together)

but bottom line is any streaming content is there on your machine

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That sounds ace, I wondered where they were being stored. But I still don't really understand how to get there. What does the *nix and /tmp mean?

*nix is an umbrella term for unix (and unix-like) operating systems
Eg. Linux, MacOS, BSD, etc.

/tmp is a directory on *nix systems

here it is

http://www.snoopy.force9.co.uk/tmp.png

This directory holds any temporary data that applications create
(contents is erased each reboot)


If I goto Youtube, and start playing a flash video
it is buffered into my temp directory

Just a normal file
it'll look something like this

Flash2sxc2P

wait for the whole video to buffer, then just copy (and rename) this file to anywhere you want

Actually Ynot, OSX's cache is far more complex than that. And usually they go into the application's cache, not /tmp. It's all but impossible to get streaming content from OSX.

TubeTV is a program that will download any flash-based streaming video and convert it into H.264 for you and place it whereever you want.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ninja9578

Actually Ynot, OSX's cache is far more complex than that. And usually they go into the application's cache, not /tmp. It's all but impossible to get streaming content from OSX.

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My operating system's XP, and I still can't find it.

Thanks for telling me about TubeTV though I don't want it to only be able to work on iTunes.

Open a folder and write %temp% in the address bar and hit Enter.

Then do a search for one of the words in the name of the video, like if you're watching a video of Elvis, search for Elvis.

I'm not sure if this will work, but if Ynot is correct, then it will.

http://www.nchsoftware.com/streamvcr/index.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Idolfan

My operating system's XP, and I still can't find it.

Thanks for telling me about TubeTV though I don't want it to only be able to work on iTunes.

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Oh, TubeTV isn't supported on Windows, and iTunes files should be able to be played in any modern Media Player.