Tech Talk

I was viewing a video on youtube and suddenly thought I wanted to download the video for offline viewing. I have a fresh install of debian etch, a 1/21 CD install. So, you know what little tools are available on my machine. Above this I don’t have a really fast internet connection that I can afford the video twice. Of course, it was just a five minute video. But I had seen two minutes of it, which I didn’t want to download again. Actually, I started to see this video a week back, and every time I would cut it out at 1 minute!

I use Iceweasel that comes packed with etch and I had installed flash player 9 from the adobe website. I could not open a second tab and search for the youtube download plugin, because the download bandwidth was occupied entirely by youtube!! (Remember that mine is not a “broad”band connection!) So, I casually get to the /tmp folder and bingo, the video is getting buffered there as a single file (Flash**** something is the file name). I don’t know if this is how youtube videos are always played!? Well they had to get buffered somewhere, right? Now I have the video saved and without going through it a second time. If this is a bug, then you guys at youtube better have a look at this. Or else, hey this is just another simple way to download the video. Unless of course, you were using a download manager, that is.