I was working my way through some FBSL (a scripting language)
scripts, and came across a "U-Tube Grabber" script, written
by Gerome Guillemin. Last week, everybody was talking about
the hottie pHilton video, so I tried out Gerome's script on
that. Sure enough, the script downloaded a "flv" (flash video)
file. Get PH4P here (current 15Aug08):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HeealouOeQ

And so, how does one play that from script? I googled around,
and came up with a (free) video player, found on the "Web Design"
website, and authored by Steven Weber. That worked perfectly
well to play the video. But then, I started removing "extraneous
code", and "after-all-is-said-and-done", I was left with simply
ShockWaveFlash (am activeX control). The version I am using here
is version 9, but probably any recent version will do.

O.K., so you put the PH4P video file, an "swf" (shock-wave flash)
file and my (hta) script into a folder, try it and it doesn't work.
What happened? Turns out that the swf file is telling the SWF
actX control what video to play. I had to rename PH4P video file
to "video01.flv", then it _did_ work. Note that you shockwave
flash experts can probably use an swf editor to change the flv
file name.



My next step was to write this note, and post those three files
to this ng. WRONG!!! The ng server refused to upload the video
file because it was too long (2mb).

Uh-oh. What to do now? As you may already know, there is no
convenient right-click option on YouTube to download the video.
My first thought was to convert Gerome's FBSL script to vbs, so
that I could upload the converted vbs script and let people use
that to download a video file. I was able convert the download
-webpage part, but the download-video file part was done with api
calls to wininet.dll, and calling api's from vbs script is
something that "pure" scripters are not allowed to do. Then I
had another thought, there is an msInet.ocx (part of the vb
package) that is an actX control which is "supposed" to provide
vb programmers with an "easier" interface to wininet.dll than
calling api's. Sure enough, I was able to set that up and call
msInet.ocx from script -- but that didn't work. Apparently
msInet.ocx can not deal with a site which wishes to install
"cookies" on your system. In searching for a solution to that,
most vb experts I came across expressed the opinion that
msInet.ocx was cr*p, and recommend calling wininet.dll directly.
Back to the stating box.

And back to google. Searching for "rip youtube video" turns up
hundreds of responses (gasp!), and so one does not want for
solutions. So here we go:

Solution 1. If you are comfortable with FBSL (or willing to try)
then you can install the FBSL scripting language and run Gerome's
script directly.

http://www.fbsl.net/phpbb2/viewtopic...f5fc301629f644

Solution 2. If you are a firefox browser user, then go to the
firefox addin page, and download and install the "DownloadHelper"
addin. Then browse over to your youtube page of choice, and wait
for the "video streaming" to finish (but not necessarily to finish
playing). When DownloadHelper detects a page with a video file,
it will lite-up and start bouncing around. You then click the
tiny down arrow next to the D.H. icon and it will give you a
drop-down menu of the videos found on the page. Click on the
one you want, and it will download it to your desktop.

Solution 3. If you are an IE browser user, go to your youtube
page of choice, and wait for the streaming to finish, same as above.
Then you can find the video file in your user "settings and documents"
path, in a folder found under: "Temporary Internet Files/Content.IE5/... ".
In that folder there will be several sub-folders with alpha-numeric
names. Use "find files" to search through those folders to get
your flash video (flv) file.

Solution 4. If none of the above is satisfactory, then back
to google, and use any of the hundreds of "youtube ripper"
utilities, you will find both free and for-sale utilities.

Got all that? O.K., so we are assuming now that you can get
a suitable video file, either PH4P, or one of your own choosing.
You must place all three files (hta, swf, flv) in the same
folder. Don't forget to change the filename of the video file
to video01.flv. Then run the hta. If all goes well, you will
see your video file playing in the hta dialog.

cheers, jw

p.s. uh-oh. I noticed that I was using a vb statusbar control
on the hta page. If you don't happen to have that control
(chances are you DO), then you can just strip it out. If you
don't have the shockwave flash control, then I would be surprised.
There are sites all over the web with flash content, especially
new car sites, and you are constantly barraged with suggestions
to download the latest flash (shockwave flash) viewer.

Thanks for all that info. I've been using
DownloadHelper with FLVPlayer
( http://www.applian.com/flvplayer/ )
I'm not certain how I ended up with that,
but I don't allow Flash to be installed in my
browser, so I'm guessing that FLVPlayer was
what I found to play FLV without needing Flash.

DownloadHelper is very nice, and it allows me
to keep script disabled. Unfortunately, there are
very few sites other than Youtube where it seems
to work. A lot of sites are determined to force
visitors to stream anew each time they want to
view a video. In looking at source code it appears
that some of those sites are actually using backend
operations to start the download, so there seems
to be no way to access the file link.

It would be nice if someone could come up with a
"DownloadHelper Deluxe" that would walk through the
beginning of streaming on any site, then drop the
stream and return the .flv URL. I don't know enough
about streaming to know whether that's possible. For
now I mainly restrict my video watching to TV.

> I was working my way through some FBSL (a scripting language)
> scripts, and came across a "U-Tube Grabber" script, written
> by Gerome Guillemin. Last week, everybody was talking about
> the hottie pHilton video, so I tried out Gerome's script on
> that. Sure enough, the script downloaded a "flv" (flash video)
> file. Get PH4P here (current 15Aug08):
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HeealouOeQ
>
> And so, how does one play that from script? I googled around,
> and came up with a (free) video player, found on the "Web Design"
> website, and authored by Steven Weber. That worked perfectly
> well to play the video. But then, I started removing "extraneous
> code", and "after-all-is-said-and-done", I was left with simply
> ShockWaveFlash (am activeX control). The version I am using here
> is version 9, but probably any recent version will do.
>
> O.K., so you put the PH4P video file, an "swf" (shock-wave flash)
> file and my (hta) script into a folder, try it and it doesn't work.
> What happened? Turns out that the swf file is telling the SWF
> actX control what video to play. I had to rename PH4P video file
> to "video01.flv", then it _did_ work. Note that you shockwave
> flash experts can probably use an swf editor to change the flv
> file name.
>
> My next step was to write this note, and post those three files
> to this ng. WRONG!!! The ng server refused to upload the video
> file because it was too long (2mb).
>
> Uh-oh. What to do now? As you may already know, there is no
> convenient right-click option on YouTube to download the video.
> My first thought was to convert Gerome's FBSL script to vbs, so
> that I could upload the converted vbs script and let people use
> that to download a video file. I was able convert the download
> -webpage part, but the download-video file part was done with api
> calls to wininet.dll, and calling api's from vbs script is
> something that "pure" scripters are not allowed to do. Then I
> had another thought, there is an msInet.ocx (part of the vb
> package) that is an actX control which is "supposed" to provide
> vb programmers with an "easier" interface to wininet.dll than
> calling api's. Sure enough, I was able to set that up and call
> msInet.ocx from script -- but that didn't work. Apparently
> msInet.ocx can not deal with a site which wishes to install
> "cookies" on your system. In searching for a solution to that,
> most vb experts I came across expressed the opinion that
> msInet.ocx was cr*p, and recommend calling wininet.dll directly.
> Back to the stating box.
>
> And back to google. Searching for "rip youtube video" turns up
> hundreds of responses (gasp!), and so one does not want for
> solutions. So here we go:
>
> Solution 1. If you are comfortable with FBSL (or willing to try)
> then you can install the FBSL scripting language and run Gerome's
> script directly.
>
>

http://www.fbsl.net/phpbb2/viewtopic...e&sid=a2264652
0c15d356a2f5fc301629f644

>
> Solution 2. If you are a firefox browser user, then go to the
> firefox addin page, and download and install the "DownloadHelper"
> addin. Then browse over to your youtube page of choice, and wait
> for the "video streaming" to finish (but not necessarily to finish
> playing). When DownloadHelper detects a page with a video file,
> it will lite-up and start bouncing around. You then click the
> tiny down arrow next to the D.H. icon and it will give you a
> drop-down menu of the videos found on the page. Click on the
> one you want, and it will download it to your desktop.
>
> Solution 3. If you are an IE browser user, go to your youtube
> page of choice, and wait for the streaming to finish, same as above.
> Then you can find the video file in your user "settings and documents"
> path, in a folder found under: "Temporary Internet Files/Content.IE5/...

".

> In that folder there will be several sub-folders with alpha-numeric
> names. Use "find files" to search through those folders to get
> your flash video (flv) file.
>
> Solution 4. If none of the above is satisfactory, then back
> to google, and use any of the hundreds of "youtube ripper"
> utilities, you will find both free and for-sale utilities.
>
> Got all that? O.K., so we are assuming now that you can get
> a suitable video file, either PH4P, or one of your own choosing.
> You must place all three files (hta, swf, flv) in the same
> folder. Don't forget to change the filename of the video file
> to video01.flv. Then run the hta. If all goes well, you will
> see your video file playing in the hta dialog.
>
> cheers, jw
>
> p.s. uh-oh. I noticed that I was using a vb statusbar control
> on the hta page. If you don't happen to have that control
> (chances are you DO), then you can just strip it out. If you
> don't have the shockwave flash control, then I would be surprised.
> There are sites all over the web with flash content, especially
> new car sites, and you are constantly barraged with suggestions
> to download the latest flash (shockwave flash) viewer.
>