Sunday, September 09, 2007

How to save that flash file you really like

I don't know about the rest of you, but every once in a while, I come across either some flash animation or a flash video/movie that I would really like to download and archive. This way, I can show it to others and share the wealth.

Well, one thing that I always hate is not knowing how to do something that should not be that trivial. One of those things that I had resolved earlier on was how to save a flash file to your hard drive from a website. Believe it or not, its really not that difficult.

NOTE: I am only going to show you how to do this in Firefox as I refuse to fire up that crap program called IE. If you want to know how to do it in there, then you figure it out. I don't use it and I am not going to use it even just to find this out.

That said, the first think you should do is to load the page containing the flash animation that you wish to download. Once you have that done, you now have two choices of how to do this, which I will explain here.

The less geeky/nerdy way:

Once the page is loaded, in your Firefox menu bar, go to "Tools -> File Info". This will bring up a box with a few tabs. One of the tabs is "Media". Click on it. You will see anywhere from one to a bunch of files listed in the Address section of the Media tab. What you want to do is scan through and click on the ".swf" file that you are wanting. Then, once you have done that, simply click on the "Save as" button and select a place to save it on your computer and click "Save".

Believe it or not, thats it.

The more geeky/nerdy/power user way:

Again, once the page is loaded, you want to open a new tab (Ctrl-T for those not in the know). Then, in that tab type the following in the URL bar: about:cache?device=disk

This will bring up a list of EVERYTHING that is in the Firefox cache on your computer. Simply browse it for the file you want. It will have the path to the website it is hosted on. All you have to do is right click and click on "Save as" and save the file wherever you want on your computer.

Again, it is that easy.

So, the next time someone asks about saving flash files, you can prod them in the right direction on how to do it.

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