A simple and easy way to recover videos that you watch on youtube is to dig firefox’s cache. This would prove good when you plan to save a video after watching it online and unfortunately you don’t have a good add-on installed. The same happened to me when i was on my Gaurav’s laptop.
Few simple steps can help you get your video file moved from \cache to \video-directory.
1. Type about:cache in the address bar.
2. Locate the section shown below on the loaded page and copy the cache directory.
3. Use the copied path to browse to the desired cache folder.
4. Now you will see number of files with alphanumeric names and without an extension.
5. Sort files according to size/modified-time.
6. Locate file intelligently, copy it to desired location and rename it with an flv extension.
7. Don’t wait and play it.
This worked for me and i’m getting used to it, may be it seems useful to you too.
Filed under: Applications, Technology, Videos, youtube , firefox, video, youtube
Thanks Gurpreet. Excellent tip, and one I expect to use a lot in future.
@Peter B. i just researched over the Internet and reformed the tip in my excellent way
How did you sort by size? I just found that searching from the bottom up using alt+p (previous find) works to let me see the size in most cases easily, and the file url is in the address bar.
I finally found the video I was looking for, but once I clicked on the key link – firefox said “The cache entry you selected is not available”. I guess firefox really enforces the “expire” date, however I can still play the video in firefox — so how do I grab it out of RAM? =)
Data size: 12141690 bytes
Fetch count: 2
Last modified: 2009-08-21 05:52:33
Expires: 2009-08-21 05:54:59
@brian
just make a right click on the screen and you will get an option, to “arrange icons” or “sort” option in xp or vista respectively. Select size and it would be sorted by size. Similarly you can sort it by date modified.
Now locate the file and copy it to a different folder, may be Desktop and rename it with .flv extension and it would work.
awesome tip. took me seconds to do it.
true it’s an awesome tip, atleast saves you from reloading firefox after installing an addon, actually if you dont have one
Didn’t work for me. I sorted the file and chose the largest one (11.2 MB). But VLC, Mplayer and Totem, all of them refuse to play it giving warning “Could not determine type of stream”. Any suggestions?
did you copy and save the file to a different location with a .flv extension?
wow nice method .
I’m gonna bookmark this one for sure.
I have had great results also with http://www.tubeleecher.com