Saving Flash Videos on Mac OS

04 Dec 2010

I recently bought a Mac and realised that saving a Flash video that's buffered in the browser is a bit more difficult than it is on my Ubuntu machine. Sometimes I like to watch a Flash video when I'm somewhere without net access so I use this technique reasonably often. Under Ubuntu, the FLV is nicely kept in /tmp and copying it to a different location for watching later is as easy as firing up Nautilus, browsing to /tmp and copying the file. (The file is removed when you close the relevant browser window). In Mac OSX it's buried somewhere under /private and is a bit of a pain to find manually. So I wrote this script to look through /private for flash files (actually only files that start with "Flash"), show them in a list with their file sizes and provide an easy method of copying them so they don't get removed when the browser window is closed. Note, ALL flash files will be listed, including small flash adverts, etc., which you probably don't want. This is why the filesize is listed – if it's a video it'll probably be a few megabytes (or more), as opposed to an advert which will typically be a few Kb.

Get the script here.

You'll need to change line 7 to an existing directory you want the files to be copied to. Use the script how you want; a suggested method is below:

$ cd /dir/of/script
$ chmod +x flash_getter.sh
$ sudo mv flash_getter.sh /usr/bin/flash_getter
$ flash_getter