Download (almost) any video with Safari
I don’t know anymore where I found this trick, but I was quite surprised this was not posted in this blog here.
You can use a little Safari trick to download (almost) any Flash video.
Info: This post is getting quite a lot of traffic, so I updated it on 2012-10-01. The instructions are now for Safari 6/Mountain Lion and Safari 5/Lion and earlier.
Safari 6
Let’s say you’re at OmniGroup’s OmniPlan’ video tutorials page and want to download their videos:
- Go to the specific page.
- Right click the video and select Inspect Element. This is only available if you’ve enabled the Develop menu.1
- In the list on the left you should see a list of resources used by the page. If not select the small curled paper icon. There should be a entry for the video. In case of OmniGroup’s VideoJS player you see an entry with an
.m4vending. - In the resources select the video and on the right is the Full URL location. (If not click the disclosure triangle in the Inspector’s top right corner.)
Other videos:
If the above didn’t work.
- Reload the page
- Bring up the Web Inspector’s Page Resource with ⌥⌘A or Develop → Show Page Reosource.
- Wait for the page to load completely. Then start the video.
- If you can’t find the video under Resources. Reload the page and go the Instrument view instead.
- Again wait for the page to load completely.
- Hit the small recording button, then start playing the video.
- The video should show in the inspector. (Hopefully)
Here’s a short video showing how to use the recording function. The video looks a bit better in fullscreen. Sorry for the bad quality.
Safari 5
- Go to the specific page.
- Bring up the Activity Window (either Window → Activity, or ⌥⌘A)
- Locate the entry with the same title as the page you want to download video Click the closure triangle.
- Start playing the video and look for an entry that is “downloading”. Download progress should be indicated in percent, or, in case of OmniGroup’s VideoJS player you see an entry with an
.m4vending. - Once you found your downloading video, ⌥-click it.
A new download should be initiated, which you can view in the Downloads popover. (View → Downloads)
This method works for many other video sites as well. Most times you don’t even need a special extension for this.