How to grab a flash video address?

ilborg · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 42 Location: Finland

As this computer doesn't run flash videos quite well with adobe flash I ask if somebody knows which is the best way to get straight address to the real video file? ngrep? As nowadays the straight address to the video is not in the html it gets really annoying to try to watch flash videos(adobe flash is really a piece of crap). I have youtube-dl but it's not suitable for other sites.

Mplayer runs just fine flash videos with right options, even with some older hardware.

digrouz · Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 7:42 am Post subject:

I use downloadhelper a plugin for firefox, it works with the most of the site I've used it, included youtbe, dailymotion etc.

Maybe this can help you?
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ilborg · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 42 Location: Finland

It could help partially. Only problem is that I use opera as main browser.

What could be the "magic" keyword in network traffic that tells when computer is requesting a flash video? Hmm... maybe I should seek to gnash site and look if there is information I need. Perhaps browsing gnash source code helps too.

Gusar · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 5:35 pm Post subject:

Sometimes the link is listed in Opera's cache view. Just go Tools->Advanced->Cache and look around. Other times the file lands in the cache folder (~/.opera/cache4). These work plenty of times. There's one huge exception - if streaming via the proprietary RTMP protocol is used. Then you're out of luck on Linux.

pianosaurus · l33t Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 944 Location: Bash$

If you find "fmt_url_map": in the youtube html-source, you can copy everything after %7C in one of the following strings. That's the url. The number in front of the %7C is the format number, in case there are several available. Format 22 is HD, format 18 is HQ, IIRC. It's probably a lot easier to use youtube-dl, but I haven't tried it.

When it comes to RTMP, it is possible too, but a lot more of a hassle. I did it by playing the stream in a browser and intercepting all the received packets. Then I had to strip the irrelevant packages, reorder them and dig out the video and audio part of what was left. I found an app to do that last part somewhere on the web, but I don't remember where. It's been a while.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the url is encoded, so use e.g. a web service to make it useable in a browser.
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Clad in Sky · l33t Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 887 Location: Germany

If you just watch the video in Opera in bad quality until it is completely streamed you should be able to find the video file itself in the /home/<username>/.opera/cache

The name is somewhat cryptic. Just sort the entries by size and you're set.
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