Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/

lsof -n -P|grep FlashXX|awk '{ print "/proc/" $2 "/fd/" substr($4, 1, length($4)-1) }'|while read f;do newname=$(exiftool -FileModifyDate -FileType -t -d %Y%m%d%H%M%S $f|cut -f2|tr '\n' '.'|sed 's/\.$//');echo "$f -> $newname";cp $f ~/Vids/$newname;done

Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

By: mhs

2012-02-25 01:49:45

awk cp cut echo grep read sed tr youtube flash flv exiftool tmpfs

2 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Recover tmp flash videos (deleted immediately by the browser plugin)

Newer versions of the flashplayer browser plugin delete the tmp flash video immediately after opening a filehandle to prevent the user from "exporting" the video by simply copying the /tmp/FlashXYZ file. This command searches such deleted flash videos and creates symbolic links to the opened filehandle with the same name as the deleted file. This allows you to play your flash-videos (from e.g. youtube) with e.g. mplayer or copy the buffered video if you want to keep it. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
ls /tmp/Flash*
```
17

for h in `find /proc/*/fd -ilname "/tmp/Flash*" 2>/dev/null`; do ln -s "$h" `readlink "$h" | cut -d' ' -f1`; done

hons · 2011-03-02 09:43:42 8
Play flash video in the cache (loaded) with mplayer

Alias to play flash videos with mplayer. You can replace mplayer with your favorite video player. This alias supports Chrome & Firefox's way of handling the flash plugin. It will play all the videos in the cache. Note that certain videos might never make it to the cache, if the publisher ask for them not to: they will just be loaded in RAM. A variant if you're just interested in playing the audio, for example for a music : alias flashmusic="mplayer -vo null \$(find /proc/\$(pgrep -f 'libgcfl|libflashplayer')/fd/ -printf '%p %l\n' |grep FlashXX | cut -d\ -f1)"
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

alias flashplay="mplayer \$(find /proc/\$(pgrep -f 'libgcflash|libflashplayer')/fd/ -printf '%p %l\n' |grep FlashXX | cut -d\ -f1)"

Aissen · 2011-12-19 09:29:57 2

What Others Think

In my tests, `exiftool` didn't find any tags containing a video title. So instead "FileModifyDate" is used as the basis of the filename. It would have been nice to at least use "MediaModifyDate", but only MP4s seemed to support that.

mhs · 587 weeks and 6 days ago

rahimhh21 · 39 weeks and 6 days ago

Perfecthomepugs · 30 weeks and 5 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

You must be signed in to comment.

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands

Similar Commands

Convert Youtube videos to MP3

Converts multiple youtube links to mp3 files

Use youtube-dl to download video with output Youtube Title

Download Entire YouTube Channel - all of a user's videos

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)