How to Download Embedded Flash Files Successfully
– Download Embedded Flash Files –
Have you ever wondered about downloading and streaming embedded videos from websites without distraction? Why not try the following ways!
Adobe Flash provides a great format, whether it be pure animation or interactive content, to display multimedia on the Web.
Most of the Flash files found online are embedded; they are simply loaded as part of a site and displayed along with the content of the rest of the page.
When an embedded Flash file is loaded for viewing by your browser, a log of the file is made. Saving a file on a hard drive is a simple matter of finding it in the page details window of the browser.
The process changes slightly depending on which Web browser you use. Flash files use the SWF file extension.
How to Download Embedded Flash Files
Launch Firefox app and load to the page containing the embedded SWF Flash file that you want to download.
Like in Chrome, you have to let the SWF file load completely.
- On any empty part of the page, right-click and select the “Page Info” context menu option.
- You’ll see that the Page Infobox has five tabs. Click on the “Media” tab. As long as the page has any media in it, the Media tab lists all image elements like icons, style sheets, and Flash files on the particular webpage.
- There’s a bit of work involved as you have to sift through the cached elements to locate the SWF file. You can narrow down your search by sorting the elements by type.
- Next, click on the item that says “Embed”, highlight it, and click “Save as” to save the file on your hard drive.
Downloading Flash Files on Chrome
You can download SWF files in Chrome without the express help of any extensions by diving into some of Chrome’s tools that are favored by developers.
The process is fairly simple:
- First, you need to open the Flash video on a Chrome tab and allow it to load completely. Next, right-click on an empty area and select Inspect Element from the context menu.
- The Developer Tools opens up in a separate frame at the bottom of the browser screen.
- Instead of searching for the specific SWF file in the jumble of code, click on the magnifying glass icon that says “Select an element in the page to inspect it”. Using the selection also helps if there are more than one video on the page.
- Click on the Flash video which gets highlighted in blue. Correspondingly, the object path is also selected in the code.
- Select the URL, paste it in the address bar of Chrome, and then open it again.
- Open the drop-down Chrome menu (Customize and control Google Chrome) from the top-right and click on the Save page. Save the flash video to your computer disk. You now have your embedded Flash file downloaded on your computer!
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Downloading Flash Files on Internet Explorer
Earlier versions of Internet Explorer made it easy to go into the Temporary Internet Files and copy the cached SWF files. You can then access the files from the browser’s “Internet Options”.
Now, all you have to do is follow these few steps of downloading flash files using Internet Explorer:
- Log into your machine with your Administrator account.
- Open IE and load the video of your choice completely.
- You have to go to the Folder Options from the Control Panel or Explorer to tweak a few visibility settings i.e. enable “Show hidden files and folders”, uncheck “Hide protected Operating System Files” and also uncheck “Hide Extensions for Known Filetypes”.
- Now, navigate to Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\
- Add “Low\Content.IE5” to the location in the address bar.
- There will be some folders with random alphanumeric names.
- Open these folders search through them manually for the SWF file. For an easier search, you can click on the “Type” column header and arrange all similar files together.
- Copy the SWF file to a location of your choice.
Once you’ve downloaded all the Flash files that you need, you can then view them in players like Media Player Classic, VLC, or whatever player it is you prefer.
Alternatively, you can simply drag and drop it into your browser.
Now that you have a few nice tricks on how to download Flash files, the next time you find a fun video, consider downloading it and keeping it offline so that you can play it whenever you want, even if you don’t have internet access!
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