Snagging YouTube videos from the cache
Update 6-22-2009 – Looks like Google stopped hard drive caching on their 720P content. Ironically, that’s the content that needs the caching the most but I guess they want to keep people from snagging the 720P clips.
Update 11/20/2009 – The cache for 720P or even 1080P content is working again.
With skyrocketing bandwidth costs due to 640 Kbps “HQ” video and 2.25 Mbps 720P “HD” video, Google is getting a massive bandwidth bill every day to deliver all those YouTube videos. To alleviate their bandwidth load (and your’s), they now cache all the video content on your hard drive. Not only does this perform better, but it also makes it easier to snag copies of the videos.
To archive a copy of the videos, watch the YouTube video stream in full and then go to the C:-Users-MyUserAccount-AppData-Local-Google-Chrome-User Data-Default-Cache folder (note that the – represents backslash because I can’t use that character for the web) or whereever your browser stores its cache, and sort the files by date. Then you can see the latest large file (typically in the tens of megabytes) and copy it out of the cache folder to somewhere permanent. Then for the higher quality videos, append the file extension .MP4 to the extensionless file and make sure you have something like K-Lite Mega Codec pack installed (Windows 7 will play .MP4 files out of the box) to play the file. The lower quality videos require .FLV extensions. I’ve never seen any DRM on the content either so it works on any computer or any device capable of playing the video format.
You could already do this to a certain extent with keepvid.com, but it didn’t always work and the file you grab from the link keepvid provides is often of inferior quality. Keepvid was also unable to show you the link to the 720P content and this cache copying technique works for 720P content as well. Just make sure you don’t switch to 720P midstream because the cache doesn’t start from the beginning of the clip. Make sure you stop the stream and start it from the very beginning to cache the full copy.
Now I can save all of those old Star Trek Videos. I figured this was a pretty simple fix, now I know.
Using Chrome are we?
Is this the default for all YouTube videos watched from google? I hope they make it clear so that people can clear that cache once in a while.. .
Most browsers have a cache limit built in. You can also use Windows Disk Cleanup to clean this stuff.
I’m using a combination of IE8 and Chrome. Chrome starts up faster and creates new tabs faster and it automatically fills in the URL without me having to push the down key stroke. That’s enough for me to launch it manually. I use IE8 as default because Chrome crashes when I click on links in Live Messenger when it spawns a page in Chrome.
Article from http://blog.dr-ivan.com/2009/06/18/tips-tricks-using-firefox-to-download-flash-movies-without-any-extra-plugins/">Dr. Ivan’s Blog:
1) Open a page with a movie you want to download
2) Wait for it to cache fully
3) While the page is still displayed (do NOT close the window or tab containing it – it will delete the movie file), go to the /tmp directory
4) Here you will find one (or more, depending on how many flash movies you are working) files which do not have any extension but have the prefix “Flash” with a hash at the end (just several jumbled letters and numbers), like so: “FlashGjqRPZ”
5) This actually is the precise file you are looking for, copy it to another location, rename it and if you wish, you can also add the correct extension: These files are usually either .flv or .mp4 (on youtube for example, the former are the low quality videos, while the latter are high-quality or HD-movies)
6) Now you can close the tab/window of your browser which contained the web page with the movie – without the fear of getting the cached file deleted
7) Well, and that’s really it! Play the movie in your favorite media player (vlc, mplayer…)
http://www.dtschmitz.com">Dietrich T. Schmitz
http://www.google.com/profiles/dtschmitz">Google Profile
Hey George, "\" will give you a backslash. Or as I just read, it’s also called a Reverse Solidus.
http://matrixmagic.com/tools/symbols.html
Didn’t know html was parsed in the comments.
Lets try this…
HTML symbol code "\" will give you \
"Update 6-22-2009 – Looks like Google stopped hard drive caching on their 720P content. Ironically, that’s the content that needs the caching the most but I guess they want to keep people from snagging the 720P clips.Update 6-22-2009 – Looks like Google stopped hard drive caching on their 720P content. Ironically, that’s the content that needs the caching the most but I guess they want to keep people from snagging the 720P clips."My method described above works with any Linux Distro using Firefox. I recommend Ubuntu 9.04
http://www.dtschmitz.com">Dietrich T. Schmitz
http://www.google.com/profiles/dtschmitz">Google Profile