How to save Flash content from a website
At present the web is full of rich media like images and flash. The much fascinating games or animation we view on different funky websites are most likely created using Flash. Whenever we open a website containing these flash files, the files get downloaded to the temporary files in the hard drive before they are played on the website. I always fancy having those cool games and funky animation in my hard drive and sending them to my friends as attachment to view them as a standalone application or for offline viewing. But downloading these contents alone from the website is not an easy task. Not to mention that downloading the whole webpage also exclude the flash content. However there are a couple of ways by which we can download tjose flash movies and games to our PC. We will discuss the methods for both Firefox and Internet Explorer tho most popular browsers available. And I will alos discuss about a couple of add ons/software to accomplish the task.
Saving Flash content in Firefox:
- Open the website from where you want to save the flash content. Let it load completely.
- Click on Tools > Page info and it will open a new window.
- Click on Media tab and it will show the whole list of images, flash and other multimedia files present in the webpage with the previews.
- Scroll in the list to locate the required flash (swf) fle and select that.
- Click on Save as and save it to any folder on your hard drive.
Saving Flash content in Internet Explorer:
All the contents of a website we visit through Internet explorer are stored in a folder called Temporary Internet files. We can easily harvest any image or flash content from that folder.
- Open the website from where you want to save the flash content. Let it load completely.
- Click on Tools > Internet Options.
- Click on Settings under browsing history section under general tab.
- It will open a new window, It will have the temporary Internet Files folder location. To open the folder click on view files.
- Once in Temporary Internet files folder, change to details view.
- Arrange the files according to the type. It will group files of one type together. We need to go to the swf type and locate the swf files from the site we wanted to save.
- Copy the flash file to any folder you want t to keep.
The files we saved from above methods are files with extension .swf (short for ShockWave Flash). These files require a standard flash player or can also be played in Internet explorer. Just double click on the file and when the dialog box appear to choose a program, select Internet explorer and the files will be [played in IE.
However if you want to have these flash files in the .exe format, the one we get from Cds or receive through mail forwards, we need to use a converter. Sparkle Flash Keeper is a very good and useful program.
The 2 methods described above requires a bit of work but they are worth doing as they do not require any additional plugin or program and can save some bucks. It also requires an intermediate level of knowledge. So if you do not want to experiment you can always take the easy root by using a third party application or plugin.
Some readymade programs
It is a standalone software to download flash content from websites. Once installed it also adds a context menu in Tools option in IE menubar. It alos ads a right click context menu in IE. It is the best software available for ripping flash as it can perform a lots of task like downloading of Flash Game, Flash Movie, Flash Templates, Flash Tutorlals, Flash Videos, Youtube Videos, Flash Cards, Flash Banners, Flash Books, Flash Cartoons etc.
It helps in downloading Flash items from the floating shortcut bar; from context menu of Internet Explorer; Detect Flash files from an URL; Search in local cache files; etc. And downloading Youtube videos using Flash saver is so easy and hassle free.
Flash Favorite makes it easy to download and save flash files (SWF, FLV) on the web pages. You can preview the flash files and optionally rename it and save the file clip on your computer for future playback.
Flash Saving Plugin lets you easily save flash movies right from Internet Explorer. Finally! There’s no need to rummage about in the browser cache anymore! If your browser is Internet Explorer, then a button is added to the Internet Explorer toolbar.
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Comment by John Philips on 19 November 2008:
Good information to know. I have wished I could save flash content dozens of times over the years. This is good marked for the next time!
Comment by prashant32 on 19 November 2008:
Great information… Spend good time to read your article.
Comment by Open Innovation on 20 November 2008:
Thank you for the information.
Comment by Jack Lee on 20 November 2008:
Thanks for your information. I am using Flash player 9.
Comment by Roger Hamilton on 20 November 2008:
Hey, didn’t know how to do it in Firefox. Heard before of the IE way quite some time back. I don’t really wish to install additional software so I guess I’ll stick to the Firefox method now that I know how to! Thanks!
Roger Hamilton
Comment by Live Presentations on 21 November 2008:
Hi..honestly i never knew we can save flash content that too from a website..!now this would be so fun try it out..!am going to disseminate this piece of info to all my friends..! am really fascinated by all technology findings..!so please keep writing such innovative stuff..!
Comment by Jana on 22 November 2008:
I’m glad I came across this information. I had been struggling for hours and you have shown me what to do thanks.
Comment by Scarpe Da Ginnastica on 23 November 2008:
This is great. It will be very useful to me, i always liked the idea to have a library of my favourite videos on my hard disk. Thanks for the sharing!
Comment by deden luo on 23 November 2008:
Excellent post! I really enjoyed reading it.
I will be back for more!
Sincerely,
Deden
Comment by prashant32 on 25 November 2008:
it is very nice to stay here you will learn more things.
Comment by Richard Carlsen on 25 November 2008:
I was very happy with this information and helped me a lot. About how to save the flash content to the web site. I learn some of the unknown information from you thank u.
Comment by laservue on 28 November 2008:
games and some flash videos will now be a part in my hard disk
Im really happy that blogs do show this type of tricks… ill stay tune for more updates regarding saving flash contents from internet sites
Comment by TW Jackson on 29 November 2008:
Wow, I have no idea you could do this… time to dump many of these bookmarks of flash content i have onto my hard drive
Comment by Lee on 30 November 2008:
I did not know you could do that. Thanks
Comment by Daily Deals on 30 November 2008:
That’s an interesting technique.
Here I come, flashy websites!
Comment by Kris on 1 December 2008:
Wow! I didn’t know about this and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one!
Comment by ericrichardson on 10 December 2008:
This is some hard to find information, trust me I looked. I found out how to download .flv files with a firefox extension called download-them-all a year or so ago. I’m not sure where you can find it, just do a search on google if you want. It has worked great for me, but sometimes it can not download the file I want, and if thats the case I use Ajay M’s tutorial called “Saving Flash content in Firefox:” above. Thank you to Ajay for helping people with this much needed information, keep up the great work!
Comment by DonnaMalone on 11 December 2008:
thanks for the info I’ve been looking for this in quite sometime now, this site has a lot of informative content thanks again.
Comment by zeriva on 14 December 2008:
After struggling for hours I am very happy with this information , thanks!
Comment by solusiplus on 15 December 2008:
Thank’s for your great tutorial. It’s a very impormative too me
Comment by AMHorizons on 18 December 2008:
Thanks for sharing such a useful piece of information.
You’ve put up each and everything in a very detailed and self-explanatory way.
It’s worth visiting your blog.
Comment by davidthink on 19 December 2008:
I really like to download the flash.Great.
Comment by xoftspyse review on 17 January 2009:
Been looking around awhile for this information, thanks!