Maggie's Farm

Follow The Money

First off, just so you know, the confusion we face over video formats is all about the money.  Licensing fees, to be exact.  Microsoft wants tons of money from companies to play and edit its proprietary WMV format — Apple balks, and so Mac users can't view by default what until recently has been the most popular form of streaming video on the 'Net.

In turn, Apple wants serious bucks for its Quicktime format — Microsoft balks and thus PC'ers can't view streaming Quicktime movies by default.

Taking advantage of this gap, Adobe bought Flash and moved in with a multi-computer format called FLV, and that's what you see on sites like YouTube.  Regardless of the original format, it's converted to FLV during the upload, and that's what you'll end up with when you save it locally.

Of course, in turn, Adobe now wants megabucks for Flash licensing fees — so both Microsoft and Apple balk — and now practically nobody can play the most popular video format on their computer.

The perils of capitalism.

Thankfully, the whole ugly situation is resolved by downloading a free player called 'KM Player' and using it for everything.  If you want to convert the FLV files to a more-normal format, there's a free converter called 'Super ©' that'll do the trick.

Types of Downloads

When  it comes to locating the just-watched video on your computer and saving it to a safe place, there are two general categories:

— If it's a big public share site, like YouTube, Flixxy, LiveLeak, College Humor, etc, it'll most likely be residing safe and sound in your 'Temporary Internet Files' folder (Internet Explorer) or the 'Cache' folder (Firefox), ready for copying to a safe location.

— If it's a private business, there's about a 25% chance that you won't be able to save the video.  There's a way to code the file so it'll play but not download, and some businesses like to keep their files proprietary.

We'll do this by browser type.  In both cases we need to 'clean the slate' first by emptying the browser's cache in order to easily locate the file later on.  If you're using Opera or Chrome, the procedure is probably similar to Firefox's.

Internet Explorer

— Go to Tools Menu, 'Internet Options'.  In the 'Browsing history' section, click on the 'Delete' button.  Uncheck everything except 'Temporary Internet files', click the 'Delete' button.  This'll take a while if you've never done it before.

— Go to the video page, play the video.  Watch the moving slider on the player to make sure all of it downloads.  You usually don't have to actually let the whole thing play, although on some sites you do.  If the download gauge on the player stops moving when you hit the 'Pause' button, the whole thing will have to be played.

— Open Tools Menu, 'Internet Options'.  In the 'Browsing history' area, click on 'Settings', then 'View files'.  Go to the View Menu of the window that pops open and select 'Details'.  On the top border of the window display area, click on 'Size' twice.  This should sort them with the largest files at the top.  The video should be noticeably larger than the other files.

— Highlight the file and hit Ctrl-C to copy it to memory, or use the Edit Menu.  Go to your vids folder and paste it in with Ctrl-V, or use the Edit Menu.  If the file name doesn't have a file extension, add ".flv" to the end.

Firefox

Firefox uses its own 'Cache' folder, but it's in a 'hidden' folder so you'll have to make a small system tweak in order to see it:

Open Control Panel, 'Folder Options', click on the 'View' tab.  Select 'Show hidden files and folders', OK.

Now open the C Drive.  Take a deep breath and navigate your way to 'Documents and Settings', your user name folder, 'Local Settings', 'Application Data', 'Mozilla', 'Firefox', 'Profiles', then a strangely-named folder like 'bbjf9b03.default'.  Inside of that you'll see a 'Cache' folder.  Highlight the icon with the right mouse button and 'Create Shortcut'.  Now copy the shortcut icon to someplace handy so you can access it later, or d-r-a-g it over to the Start Menu and drop it in.

To capture a video do this:

— Go to the Tools Menu, 'Clear Recent History'.  Click on the little 'Details' box if it's not already expanded.  Uncheck everything except 'Cache', click 'Clear Now'.

— Go to the video page, play the video.  Watch the moving slider on the player to make sure all of it downloads.  You usually don't have to actually let the whole thing play, although on some sites you do.  If the download gauge on the player stops moving when you hit the 'Pause' button, the whole thing will have to be played.

— Open the 'Cache' folder.  Go to the View Menu and select 'Details'.  On the bar at the top of the window display area, click on 'Size' twice.  That puts the largest file at the top.  It'll be much larger than anything else listed.

— Highlight the file and hit Ctrl-C to copy it to memory, or use the Edit Menu on the window.  Go to your vids folder and paste it in with Ctrl-V, or use the Edit Menu.

— Rename the file to whatever, and you'll need to tack an ".flv" on the end.

Update: 'BlogDog' mentioned in the comments that there's a widget for Firefox called 'Ant Video Downloader' which might make the process easier.

The Temp Folder

If you don't see the video in the browser folder, there's one other place to look.  It might be in whatever your system's using as its official 'Temp' folder.

The hitch here is that you can't leave the video page or the temp file will disappear — because it's only a 'temp' file.  So play the video but leave the web page open.

Depending upon operating system and a few other factors, there could be half a dozen 'Temp' folders on your system, so the trick is to find the 'active' one.  Do a Windows Search for "temp", organize them by 'Name' after the search is finished, then open up each Temp folder listed.  Most will either be empty or contain a few files.  One will be full of files.  That's the one we want.

As with the other windows, first set it to 'Details' mode, then click on 'Size' twice to bring the biggest file to the top.  If the video's there, it'll be much larger than any other file.

You'll notice that, unlike grabbing files from the browser windows, the temp file is "in use" and can't be copied to a safe folder.  The trick is to reach over and hit the computer's power button, shutting it down.  After the machine reboots, the file should be in the Temp folder, ready for copying.  It's ugly, but it works.

KM Player

I spent hours the other day evaluating the latest open-source (free) video players, and this puppy is definitely the cat's ass.  It's almost unbelievably configurable, so whatever it doesn't do correctly right out of the box can be changed later.  It also played everything I threw at it, including a couple of semi-corrupt test files I save for such occasions.

Note: Like any good video player, KMP is going to associate itself with all of your video file types (AVI, MPG, MOV, FLV, etc).  If for some reason you don't like the player and end up removing it, the video file types should revert to the former player.  If they don't, just open the player's Options and make sure all the file types are checked.

The KM Player home site is here.  Click on the big blue 'Download' link, then again.  You'll download a tiny loader program which you'll save to the computer, then run.  It's just a standard Next-Next-Next install.

After you get it fired up you'll want to run through the Preferences and make a few critical adjustments.  It'll take a few minutes but you definitely want to do this.  Right-click anywhere in the program, go to 'Options', 'Preferences':

General
— Uncheck 'Minimize to system tray'
— Uncheck 'Snap to edge/window'
— Click on the 'When Starting' tab in the box on the right, uncheck 'Restore a window...'

Now click on the + next to 'General' to open up the sub-panel:

Skins/OSC
— In the 'Skins' drop-down menu select '(Built-in Skin)'
— Check 'Disable tooltips...' (once you learn where the controls are)

Screen
— In the 'Aspect Ratio' menu select 'Keep Display Aspect Ratio'
— In the 'On Top' menu set the 'Video' box to 'Never'

Repeat/Playlist
— If you want your videos to loop, set both menus to 'Repeat All' in the 'When Finished...' area

Keyboard/Mouse
Traditionally, players pause when clicked on once and open to full-screen when double-clicked.  If that's what you'd like:
— Set 'Left Single Click' to 'Play / Pause'
— Set 'Left Double Click' to 'Toggle Full Screen'

OSD Messages
— Change color of 'Status message' from ugly yellow to something nicer
— To make the on-screen fonts a bit smaller, raise the 'Auto font size' from 50 to 60
— Uncheck 'Show filename...'

To set the size and location of the player when it's first fired up, first get it where you want on the screen and sized correctly, then open Preferences, General, Screen, 'Advanced' tab.  Click 'Get Current Size' and the two 'Get...' boxes at the bottom.  Now click on 'General' over to the left and the 'When Starting' tab on the right.  Set the 'Screen Status' to 'Go to User Preset 1'.

As noted in the beginning, I've tried a lot of video players over the years (both free and commercialware), including a whole bunch the other day, and KM Player really stands alone.  I've been using the fabled Media Player Classic for about a decade, but even it occasionally can't play some offbeat download.  KMP does it all.

Super ©

For just watching downloaded videos on your computer, you normally wouldn't need to convert anything since the amazing KM Player can play any format.  You might, however, want to import a video into a program like PowerPoint, in which case there's a 99% chance that whatever you're using won't import FLV files.  That's when you'd convert it to a standard format.

There's one little system adjustment you'll have to make if you're not currently seeing file extensions, like '.doc', '.txt', '.jpg', etc, on the end of file names.  Open Control Panel, 'Folder Options'.  Click on the 'View' tab.  Uncheck 'Hide extensions...', OK.

This is, by far, the best free video converter I've come across.  It'll convert certain types of files, like MKV, that few other programs can, even commercial studios like Adobe Premiere and ULead's VideoStudio.

The download page is here.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the "Start Downloading SUPER ©" link.  Partways down the next page click on the "download and use" link.  Scroll down to the bottom of the next page and click on the "Download Super © setup file" link.  Grab the file and install it.

Warning: This thing might take upward of a minute to load up — no kidding.  So when nothing happens when you first run it, just hang in there.  Keep reminding yourself that it’s free.

Assuming you have a firewall installed, I wouldn’t allow it to access the Internet (no need) but if you’re running something really picky like ZoneAlarm, let it access system files.

When it does (eventually) load up for the first time, you might get an error message if there’s something about your system that it doesn’t consider good enough.

Close the error box (if it popped up) and the program will appear.  Click anywhere in the program with the right mouse button to open up the big options menu:

— Select ‘Output File Saving Management’.  Either select a default folder to always save the files, or check the appropriate box down below.  Click ‘SAVE changes’.

— You might like the pop-up hints at first.  If you want to turn them off, select ‘Show Useful Hints’.

— If you’re getting the warning message when it fires up, turn it off with ‘Show Warning Messages…’

— If you'd like it to notify you when it's finished, select 'Play a sound...'

Converting To AVI

AVI is the standard Windows format and every program should be able to import it.  Note that this first time around you'll have to adjust a few settings, but they'll stay in place for later conversions.

— Right-click anywhere in the program to open the big menu, select the first entry.  Find the file to be converted.

— In the upper-left box, select 'AVI'.  In the box to the right, select 'DivX'.  The audio box to the far right should be set to 'MP3'.

— Just below that area, check 'FFmpeg'.

— In the green video box, make sure 'NoChange' and '29.97' are selected.  Select '1008' in the drop-down menu over to the right.

— In the blue audio area, set to '22050', '2', '128'.

Note: The above settings are for the standard semi-crappy web video.  If it's a high-quality piece, set the video 'Bitrate' to '2016' and the audio settings to '48000' and '160'.

— Click the 'Encode' button at the bottom, 'Yes' to the box that pops up, and it should convert the file.

Check the file name of the converted file.  The program probably left the original file extension in and capitalized the ".FLV", like "coolvid.wmv.FLV".  Get it looking right.

Troubleshooting

— If you get a red error message in the lower-right part of the program, set the audio’s ‘Sampling’ to ‘11025?, and try using a pre-set ‘Video Scale Size’.

— If for some reason the program you're trying to import the video into rejects it, or the audio/video is out of sync, try the above using the 'huffYUV' setting instead of 'DivX'.

— Super may or may not convert SWF files, depending.  SWF files are videos inside of a 'package' that does something else, like show the video in a custom player.  If it converts it at all, you'll end up with just the bare video, not the extra stuff.  Ditto any freebie SWF-to-FLV converters you find out there.  Normally, this is okay, but if the extra stuff is what made the video attractive in the first place, you're going to lose it.

Converting To FLV

In case you want to put an FLV video on your web or blog site, the procedure is the same as above except you select ’FLV / SWF (Flash)’ and 'Flash Video' in the top boxes.  (If you want to get a blog site going, here ya go.)

The FLV should play in any standard online Flash player.  While there's an 'official' Flash player out there, there are better ones around.  The one I use here and on my own site is called JW Player.

Any questions, give a holler.