copying .FLV files from the cache

PIR8 4 @11

I want to lift the .FLV video files from Youtube etc directly from my cache. I understand that Youtube in particular has made this process more difficult by changing where the files are stored. I'm also aware that the file can be found after it has been deleted if it's still open in the browser, as it is still referenced for later use.

I've found nothing in the /tmp file. I've also done an extensive search in the

~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/Cache

directory. Any flash file I found I'd slap an .flv tag at the end and run it through VLC player. I made sure to keep the video open in the browser, pausing it before it finished to keep it from being deleted. I also let it finish to see if that would make a difference.

I decided to try find the deleted file. I used the following commands:

lsof | grep Flash

This command turned up no results.

lsof | grep flash

this only turned up files from the directory

/opt/mint-flashplugin-11/libflashplayer.so

lsof | grep deleted

none of these files looked big enough, nor where they in any kind of browser cache. the files I found here belonged to the following directories:

~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata

/usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi2-registryd

/usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi-bus-launcher

I've accomplished the same task with a Firefox addon, but I'd like to be able to do it manually. If anyone can help me out, I'd be much obliged.

3/13/2013

mfillpot

Have you tried using youtube-dl from the CLI to download the videos?

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

PIR8 4 @11

Yes that did work, thanks very much. That allows me to dl through a script. (-:

If anyone knows how I can find video files in the cache, I'm still very interested in that information.

mfillpot

If you wish to manually locate video files in a directory you can use the file utility which outputs the file type based upon the mime information in the first few lines of the file, such as.

ls -tr|xargs file|grep Flash|cut -d " " -f 1

Which will use the file utility to show the file types for all files in your directory, then grep the flash videos and it uses cut to parse out only the filename.