WE have a case here for which one of the attorneys wants to capture and save a news report from the station’s website. The video is a Flash video and is embeded in a webpage featuring the new story. I’ve looked around the internet but can’t find a quickie website that will grab and save the video the way you can with YouTube stuff.
Anyone done this before and can maybe point me to a free site/tool that will get this done?
DownloadHelper supports a bunch of different Flash video players, and I’ve used it before successfully. Some news sites come up with their own custom way of obfuscating the source of the raw video stream though, so there’s no guarantee it’ll work everywhere.
I tried Downloadhelper and it doesn’t even recognize that the video on that page is Flash. The little button doesn’t light up and activate at all on that page.
It may be that it’s simply not possible to save this video because of the way it’s embedded in the page, and that’s fine.
Do you have a link, so perhaps we can try some programs for you and report what works?
Sure, if you have time to mess with it I’d greatly appreciate the effort. The video is the one embedded in this story.
Could you maybe get FRAPS (a screen-capture tool that game reviewers use to make movies), and do a screen capture while the Flash is playing? I have no idea if this would work or not, but I need to get FRAPS to record some videos of my current XNA game project, so I’ll be dinking with it soonish…
Video screen capture where you drag a box over the area to capture, resulting in an instant perfect result in the file format of your choice.
Repo - FRAPS might work, I’ll mess with it and see.
Rob - Thanks, but we have no Macs here, only PCs.
You can’t just get the station to cut you a DVD or VHS copy of the story?
You could try StreamTransport. It is free, for Windows, and purportedly supports capturing of Flowplayer streams (which is what the site is using).
That worked brilliantly! I now have an FLV file of the video created by StreamTransport, which I have the software to convert to a file format playable in Media Player, so I’m all set.
You, sir, are a genius. If you ever pass through Cincinnati I owe you a Guinness (or beer of your choice). Thank you!
capture flash videos from the web, perhaps not difficult as you see, many videos are embedded on the web, but some are free to watch and download, while other videos are DRM protected. The common downloader may be fit for a part of video sites. So you should find a video downloader that could capture embedded video from any streaming video sites.