Earlier this week, Simon left a comment wondering how he might archive an Amazon Flash video. Like most problems, there are a variety of solutions. And my preferred method for simply grabbing Flash video (versus a Flash animation) found on an Amazon, YouTube, etc is via the free Real Player. While there’s a Mac OS X beta available, I’ve never gotten it to work and exclusively rely on Real’s PC counterpart. I haven’t always a fan of Real given their past install methods and bloat… However, while Real still adds to your system overhead, I find them much more neighborly these days.
Real Player? Oh man, that hurts. People really still use that?
If you can get the URL ( sometimes tricky with embedded Flash video ) try Zamzar:
http://www.zamzar.com/conversionTypes.php#videos
…which I use all the time to strip the audio out of YouTube videos. Lots of conversion options, decent quality ( audiophiles can forget it ) and best of all it’s free.
I haven’t actually converted Flash video in some time… I recall using Riva, though I don’t know how it holds up these days and if it’s still free.
Why not use Firefox and the Video Download Help add-on?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006
I should mention there are many similar FireFox plugins as well: UnPlug, Flash Video Resources Downloader, and Media Pirate. If the Video DownloadHelper doens’t work, one of these probably will.
I’ve tried a lot of those video download plugins for Firefox, as well as the various web sites that offer similar services. They sometimes work. However, over time you’ll find different ones do/don’t work with different web sites.
I’ve given up on all that and bought a license to Replay Media Catcher, which has worked with everything I’ve tried, including hulu by the way (I’ve used that to watch Battlestar Galactica episodes when the hotel LAN connection was too slow).
I also would be interested in others ideas on what video conversion software to use to get the content out of Flash format, which is pretty limiting.
BTW Replay Media Catcher works with the new Adobe Media Player/Air Application…