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get-flash-videos

get-flash-videos is a command-line utility to download flash video from most video sharing websites, which works on Linux, Windows and MacOSX. Yes, there are many applications or Firefox addons such as DownloadHelper which can do this. Well, sort of, because they all fail at some point: get-flash-videos program uses rtmpdump to get even the stuff that's locked up with Adobe's proprietary DRM known as RTMP; while most of these little video downloader addons, programs and sites will be able to grab your average youtube video, they're not going to be able to get anything from a site that's streaming using RTMP.

Includes support for the following sites/players (and more!):

* YouTube, eHow, Brightcove (used by many sites like Channel 4, Daily Telegraph ...), BBC (news, etc), Metacafe, 5min, Google, fliqz, nicovideo, vimeo, Blip, Break, Collegehumor, Muzu, Sevenload, Megavideo, Wat.tv.
* Also includes a 'generic' method which works on many other sites.

get-flash-videos Installation / Usage

Requirements

Basic requirements:

  • perl >= 5.8.0
  • WWW::Mechanize (but not for the combined version, see OSX below).

Optional requirements (for support for certain sites):

  • rtmpdump (see section below)
  • XML::Simple
  • Data::AMF
  • Compress::Zlib

1. Ubuntu

Run the following commands in a terminal (this installs it system-wide):
sudo apt-get install libwww-mechanize-perl libxml-simple-perl
wget http://get-flash-videos.googlecode.com/files/get-flash-videos_1.14-1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i get-flash-videos_1.14-1_all.deb

Then, to download something:
get_flash_videos url..


2. Other Linux/Unix-like OS

Install the Perl modules WWW::Mechanize (required) and XML::Simple (required for some sites). Preferably install the packaged versions of these provided by your distribution. If you can't, install the modules off CPAN - see the perlmodinstall documentation for more information.

Then run the following commands in a terminal, this installs get-flash-videos system-wide:
sudo wget http://get-flash-videos.googlecode.com/files/get_flash_videos-1.14 -O /usr/local/bin/get_flash_videos
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/get_flash_videos

Then, to download something:
get_flash_videos url..


3. Windows

Install ActivePerl, making sure you tell the installer to add perl's bin directory to your PATH.

Install the Perl modules WWW::Mechanize (required) and XML::Simple (required for some sites). You can install these using ActivePerl's PPM tool.

Save get-flash-videos somewhere on your hard disk, for example c:\flash.

Then, to download something go to: Start -> Run, type:
cmd
And then to download a video, type in cmd:
perl c:/flash/get_flash_videos url


4. OSX

Run the following commands in a terminal, this installs it in your home directory:
curl -o get_flash_videos http://get-flash-videos.googlecode.com/files/combined-get_flash_videos-1.14
chmod a+x get_flash_videos
Then, to download something:
./get_flash_videos url..
Note: you may also need to install the Perl modules XML::Simple and Data::AMF for support for some sites.

rtmpdump

get_flash_videos can download videos from servers over RTMP, this needs rtmpdump. You can get a copy of rtmpdump from here. If you compile it or use an unpackaged version you should copy this to somewhere on your PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin).

For help on using the scrip, see it's manpage.