There could be many reasons why you want do download streaming video from the Web. Maybe your Internet connection is too slow and it keeps buffering, or you prefer to watch video offline on your laptop or smartphone. Make sure it is not illegal to download and save the videos from a particular website before you start.
There are plenty of free utilities and Firefox addons which allow to download flash videos from Youtube and and similar websites. There are enough tutorials online and I am not going to discuss this here.
Sometimes downloading flash videos can be more challenging and standard tools may not work, especially for flash video streamed over RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol).
First of all you can try Orbit Downloader. More info here. Be caution when installing this software. Although it does not seem to contain any viruses or spyware, it is an advertising supported product therefore it may try to install some additional third party software, change your browser home page, etc. It also contains some P2P modules and "Software Updater" which can be annoying and most of the time completely useless. Un-sellect all third party tools while installing it, after installation check settings to disable autostart and all unnecessary modules. Or just install it on a Virtual PC to be completely safe.
Orbit Downloader has couple of additional tricks which may work for you:
1. First try "Get IT" button which appears on a flash video when Orbit is installed.
2. Then try "Grabb++" (right click on Orbit icon is system tray and choose Grab++ to launch it). It must be running before you launch flash video.
3. Then try "GrabPro" to save video while it's streaming. GrabPro appears as a toolbar in Internet Explorer. There is a link to instruction on how to use it under Orbit Icon on the toolbar.
If none of this works you can try RTMPDump utility. More info here. It is a command line tool so not everyone will be comfortable using it. It is pretty powerfull too though and I using it had some good results, where all other utilities failed.
You don't need to install it. Just extract .zip file and run rtmpdump.exe in command prompt (CMD).
Run rtmpdump.exe --help to see all options.
To download videos using RTMPDump, first of all you need to find out URL of the video. Again, there are number of tools for this. One of them is a freeware URL Snooper. It seems to do the job most of the time however it failed to snoop some URLs for me. The best one from the bunch I tried was the same Gabb++ from Orbit Downloader (see above).
1. If your video URL looks somethinkg like this:
rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest/2011.03.25-video.flv
Try following:
rtmpdump.exe -r "rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest/2011.03.25-video.flv" -o "C:\video.flv"
This will try to download the video and save it as "video.flv" on your C drive.
2. If your URL looks like it is combined from multiple links, something like this:
rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest|flash/videos/latest| 2011.03.25-video.flv|http://player.defg.otherdomain.com/flashplayer/play.swf| http://www.jklm.domain.com/tvonline&HKL_name=2011.03.25-video.flv
You will need to extract and possibly combine your video URL from information in the full link. It could be trial and error method. For the example above the video link would be:
rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest/2011.03.25-video.flv
Again try the same:
rtmpdump.exe -r "rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest/2011.03.25-video.flv" -o "C:\video.flv"
to save the file on your C drive.
3. If this fails as well, you may need to provide RTMPDump with URL to the original flash player swf file.
You should be able to find link to the player in the same combined download URL.
Let's take the same example:
rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest| flash/videos/latest|2011.03.25-video.flv|http://player.defg.otherdomain.com/flashplayer/play.swf| http://www.jklm.domain.com/tvonline&HKL_name=2011.03.25-video.flv
Your swf player file link will be:
http://player.defg.otherdomain.com/flashplayer/play.swf
And actual video file as before is:
rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest/2011.03.25-video.flv
This time use command:
rtmpdump.exe -r "rtmp://abcd.somedomain.com/flash/videos/latest/2011.03.25-video.flv" -o "C:\2011.03.22.flv" -W "http://player.defg.otherdomain.com/flashplayer/play.swf"
Depending on Internet connection it may take couple of trials to successfully download your video.
