Saving youtube video from google chrome

If you remember my post about youtube flv cache files, I've been saving my youtube video's manually. I like this approach because it allowed me to watch the video first, if I found it interesting then I will save the video. While some firefox plugin allow you to save youtube videos, it often force you to re-download the video from the beginning. And if you just download the video without watching it first, some time after one hour of waiting you just end up with a complete garbage !

These days I'm using Google Chrome as my main browser. So I'm faced with the same problem in a different environment. Unlike firefox, Chrome uses the windows temp to store its temporary files. Including the FLV files. But it's very defensive. You can't copy the cache while chrome uses it, and if you close the tab that shows the video, Chrome will immediately delete the file. Giving you no time to copy it. Damn you google guys :P

After some goggling i finally found a solution. Hobocopy to the rescue ! Hobocopy is an open source utility that can copy copy-protected file in windows. You can download hobo copy from here. Using this approach I can copy the protected files. The flv cache files can be identified easily by their name and size.  Usually it will start with fla and end up with .tmp extension. So using Hobocopy i can copy the file i want as simple as :

C:\HoboCopy.exe C:\temp F:\MyVideos\ fla18E.tmp

But you must be aware, since Hobocopy is not actually a file copy utility, the Syntax is a bit different.

Another thing that I've found out is about the firefox case. Remember when firefox only cache a part of my video but I can still play the full video in my browser. It turn out you can get the full FLV video's from Windows temp directory using this same exact method.

Now i can view my Youtube video's without worry about rebuffer and wasted a lot of bandwidth :D