The Linux Society

Here's a tip I came across on the Ubuntu forums. Its a rather obvious one but quite useful.

You've all likely heard of YouTube , Google Videos and other websites that use a flash player they've made to stream .flv files to your computer. When it streams it obviously has to stick the .flv somewhere in your system temporarily. So where do temporary files go in the linux file system? You've probably got it by now.  The /tmp folder.

So here we go with a step by step:

1. Browse to a YouTube video using your favourite browser.
2. Watch the video , or at least wait for it to finish downloading the file (you can tell normally , the red bar that gradually fills , you know what I mean)
3. Keep the internet browser open on the page with the video.
4. Navigate to the /tmp folder with your file manager.
5. Look for a .flv file with a name similair to FlashRNDML36  , it should have the word Flash and then some letters and numbers if its you tube anyway.
6. Copy and Paste this file to where you want to keep it.
7. Open it with your favourite movie player. VLC or Totem works well.
8. You could then convert it from .flv to a nicer format (for viewing on a mobile phone or other device) using a conversion program (google it) which I'm sure there are many.

I realise there are plugins for firefox to do this but I found this to be a nice and simple way of getting a hold of the file.

- Gordon