Recording Videos Off The Internet

[Small Man Big Horse]

Now this is obviously sickeningly illegal but there are a couple of things online which I'd like to record and have permanent copies of, and it's not youtube or dailymotion or anything like that so I can't use one of the many programmes available for such sites. So does anyone know how this can be done? I've tried to follow a couple of guides but appear to be rather stupid and so have yet to be successful.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Just find some porn mags in the woods, like in the old days.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I've tried that but the bigger kids beat me up and stole them from me.

[JesusAndYourBush]

On Chrome open the Developer tools bit (ctrl+shift+i)
Click the 'network' tab at the top.
Just below where you clicked 'network' there's a row of icons. The first one is little circle - if it's grey/black click it so it turns red.
In the 'filter' box just below that type mp4.
Leave develper tools open and visit the page containing the video.
In the network activity a bunch of links will appear. This is all the stuff your browser is accessing (you'll see that even when it's 'doing nothing' there's often a lot of activity below the surface.).  There's a lot of stuff, that's why we use the filter to narrow it down to the stuff we want. You might need other filters such as mp3 or flv depending on what type of content you're after so experiment with this as mp4 might not be what it's being served as..
You can rightclick a link in that list and 'open link in new tab'.  What you want to do is find which link is the video that you want, open it in a new tab, then in that new tab you'll be able to rightclick and save.

You might see the video being served as a series of very small .ts files.  Although it's possible to grab these small files and join them back together it's a ballache, so in developer tools, at the bottom it says "User agent" and it's ticked.  Untick it, and underneath you can select from different devices, Ipad, Blackberry, etc.  This makes Chrome spoof as that device.  Because some devices have to be served a complete video file rather that one that's spit up into pieces, go through the different devices (you have to refresh the page after selecting one) and find one where you get served the video file as a basic mp4, then open in new tab and save.

(Firefox also has a developer tools which works pretty much the same way.)

[olliebean]

youtube-dl works with most sites that anything else easily available works with. Some sites have DRM that it can't break, and for those you probably need a screen recorder, i.e., a program that records the video off the screen as it plays rather than ripping the actual stream. Don't know much about them, as I've never successfully used one myself - my old computer wasn't powerful enough to do the real-time encoding and I've not tried with my new one - but the quality will obviously suffer if you do it that way.

[jamiefairlie]

On Chrome open the Developer tools bit (ctrl+shift+i)
Click the 'network' tab at the top.
Just below where you clicked 'network' there's a row of icons. The first one is little circle - if it's grey/black click it so it turns red.
In the 'filter' box just below that type mp4.
Leave develper tools open and visit the page containing the video.
In the network activity a bunch of links will appear. This is all the stuff your browser is accessing (you'll see that even when it's 'doing nothing' there's often a lot of activity below the surface.).  There's a lot of stuff, that's why we use the filter to narrow it down to the stuff we want. You might need other filters such as mp3 or flv depending on what type of content you're after so experiment with this as mp4 might not be what it's being served as..
You can rightclick a link in that list and 'open link in new tab'.  What you want to do is find which link is the video that you want, open it in a new tab, then in that new tab you'll be able to rightclick and save.

You might see the video being served as a series of very small .ts files.  Although it's possible to grab these small files and join them back together it's a ballache, so in developer tools, at the bottom it says "User agent" and it's ticked.  Untick it, and underneath you can select from different devices, Ipad, Blackberry, etc.  This makes Chrome spoof as that device.  Because some devices have to be served a complete video file rather that one that's spit up into pieces, go through the different devices (you have to refresh the page after selecting one) and find one where you get served the video file as a basic mp4, then open in new tab and save.

(Firefox also has a developer tools which works pretty much the same way.)

That used to work perfectly for me but the last few times I've tried there's no media files show up at alll. I assumed the developers had cottoned on to this and came up with a new way to play the video that doesn't show up in developer tools.

[a duncandisorderly]

on a mac, if the usual browser add-ons won't work, I've used quicktime to do screen-recordings.... basically you draw a box round the video & press go, then play the video. you can trim off the preamble, cursor movements & so forth afterwards. there are third-party screen recorders that do much the same- the sorts of things people use to make how-to videos for yt that show their entire desktop, but most of these record the computer's mic input (for obvious reasons). it's a convoluted business, involving third-party audio routing software, but you can get quicktime to record the computer's output instead. I've used this to capture iplayer stuff when there's been no other way to preserve it; though you end up with an enormous file, you can transcode it to something more sensible later using (e.g.) handbrake.

[Neomod]

Flash Video Downloader and Stream Video Downloader from the chrome store seem to handle most things for me.

[Bazooka]

Have you tried tracing paper and a 2B pencil？It's laboureless, but you can't put a price on quality.

[Small Man Big Horse]

On Chrome open the Developer tools bit (ctrl+shift+i)
Click the 'network' tab at the top.
Just below where you clicked 'network' there's a row of icons. The first one is little circle - if it's grey/black click it so it turns red.
In the 'filter' box just below that type mp4.
Leave develper tools open and visit the page containing the video.
In the network activity a bunch of links will appear. This is all the stuff your browser is accessing (you'll see that even when it's 'doing nothing' there's often a lot of activity below the surface.).  There's a lot of stuff, that's why we use the filter to narrow it down to the stuff we want. You might need other filters such as mp3 or flv depending on what type of content you're after so experiment with this as mp4 might not be what it's being served as..
You can rightclick a link in that list and 'open link in new tab'.  What you want to do is find which link is the video that you want, open it in a new tab, then in that new tab you'll be able to rightclick and save.

You might see the video being served as a series of very small .ts files.  Although it's possible to grab these small files and join them back together it's a ballache, so in developer tools, at the bottom it says "User agent" and it's ticked.  Untick it, and underneath you can select from different devices, Ipad, Blackberry, etc.  This makes Chrome spoof as that device.  Because some devices have to be served a complete video file rather that one that's spit up into pieces, go through the different devices (you have to refresh the page after selecting one) and find one where you get served the video file as a basic mp4, then open in new tab and save.

(Firefox also has a developer tools which works pretty much the same way.)

Thanks for all of that, it's really appreciated, I'll look in to it later tonight and report back.

youtube-dl works with most sites that anything else easily available works with. Some sites have DRM that it can't break, and for those you probably need a screen recorder, i.e., a program that records the video off the screen as it plays rather than ripping the actual stream. Don't know much about them, as I've never successfully used one myself - my old computer wasn't powerful enough to do the real-time encoding and I've not tried with my new one - but the quality will obviously suffer if you do it that way.

Unfortunately youtube-dl doesn't work in these cases, I have looked in to obtaining a screen recorder but was a bit confused, hence this thread.

on a mac, if the usual browser add-ons won't work, I've used quicktime to do screen-recordings.... basically you draw a box round the video & press go, then play the video. you can trim off the preamble, cursor movements & so forth afterwards. there are third-party screen recorders that do much the same- the sorts of things people use to make how-to videos for yt that show their entire desktop, but most of these record the computer's mic input (for obvious reasons). it's a convoluted business, involving third-party audio routing software, but you can get quicktime to record the computer's output instead. I've used this to capture iplayer stuff when there's been no other way to preserve it; though you end up with an enormous file, you can transcode it to something more sensible later using (e.g.) handbrake.

Alas I'm a PC man, but thanks for taking the time out to respond anyway.

Flash Video Downloader and Stream Video Downloader from the chrome store seem to handle most things for me.

I'll look in to those if the other methods don't work, thank you.

Edit: Stream Video Downloader was the way I got it to work in the end, thank you so much for posting that, it's enormously appreciated.