Saving YouTube Flash Videos

This is a kind of part 2 to my Fedora and YouTube, Part 1, but in reality, it should work with most distributions. So now I can go to YouTube, and listen to jazz selections like this, but what if I want to hear them again? How about if I'm travelling, and I don't have easy access to the web? FireFox has a number of add-in modules to assist with capturing video to the hard drive, but really, it's already there. All it takes is knowing where it is, and what it looks like. When playing Flash material through YouTube, or a YouTube-like service, the flash stream is saved to /tmp as "Flashxxxxxx" where xxxxxx are some string of random appearing characters. Much like: [gar@localhost tmp]$ ll F* -rw------- 1 gar gar 3069078 2008-03-11 17:18 FlashG1eaB1 -rw------- 1 gar gar 69786822 2008-03-11 17:23 Flashw7ZxbW All I need to do is to move the file, perhaps to the Videos folder in my home directory, and presto! I have a copy of the Flash file. Open a terminal window with Alt-F2, and then enter konsole in the command box. Navigate to the temp directory with cd /tmp. Figure out the file name with ll F* and then move the completed file with mv Flashw7ZxbW ~/Video/My_Saved_Movie.flv I didn't even need to add an extra extension to Firefox to accomplish the file save. (note: the temporary file will probably be deleted when you close the flash window, so move the file first.) Now that I have the Flash file, I need to be able to play it. The hard drive install of Fedora 8 Live KDE includes Kaffeine which will work perfectly. Open the home directory browser by clicking on the house icon in the lower left corner of the screen. Click on the Videos folder to open Videos, Right click on My_Saved_Movie.flv, and Open With -> Kaffeine. If Kaffeine is not listed, select Other, and find Kaffeine under the Multimedia tab. You may also want to check the box to make this a permanent association. When you select Kaffeine, a Kaffeine window will open up, and your video will start playing, whether or not the computer has an internet connection at the time.