Grabbing sample movies off of the net

[bowlinggreen]

Billiwog, how did you generate the direct link? That seems like the most efficient way, if there is a program to do it. It popped right in to the media player, no problem.

I may have to grab that flash video downloader addon for firefox, the next time I run into this problem.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who posted, I learned a bit here.

[Billiwog]

Actually not the most efficient way, but I'll tell you how to do it. You need something that will display the video URL. I used Firefox with NoScript. Go to NoScript Options > Embeddings and tick 'Apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too' and 'Forbid Adobe Flash'.

Visit the site in question and then allow only that site in NoScript; notice that the video is still blocked. Hover over the video placeholder and right click > Copy Link Location. Paste that into your address bar and delete everything except the video URL (starts after &file= and ends with an mp4 extension.) Convert the double-encoded hex to its corresponding characters and download at will.

[vo1v0d]

I am thicker than the rest of you.I used to have Realdownloader and anything playing, music or video, just neeeded the mouse to hover over it, one click and the thing would start downloading instantly to my desktop. It failed after the launch of Windows7. Is there anything comparably simple for luddites like me?

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by vo1v0d

I am thicker than the rest of you.I used to have Realdownloader and anything playing, music or video, just neeeded the mouse to hover over it, one click and the thing would start downloading instantly to my desktop. It failed after the launch of Windows7. Is there anything comparably simple for luddites like me?

No one answer works for everything. JDownloader will work for quite a few things, but not everything.

When faced with an unknown site, you'll want to open "web inspector" in "Developer tools" menu (firefox, chrome, safari all call these things slightly different things, but they're essentially the same set of tools)

You want to narrow down just what the element you're interested in actually is, and to see if there's an associated file.

If you give an example site, I'll walk you through how it works.

[Rommelbommel]

It's 2018. Most videos can be right-clicked and "save as". And if you use Firefox and come across a video that won't let right-click itself, use the VideoDownloadHelper add-on.