Saving flash video on linux

On linux, the flash-player caches video in files under /tmp. Each video gets a file called /tmp/Flash[random-string]. These are easy enough to find and rename to [meaningful-string].flv. However, some players delete these files on completion, which is a pain given they are the files containing the video we want to save.

Hard linking these files solves the problem. The Flashxxx files will be deleted by the player, but their contents will sill be available at whatever location we made the hard link.

Some players split their content into multiple files, so we want this hard linking process to be automatic.

I have the following script saved as lnflv in my ~/bin.

#!/bin/sh

cd /tmp
for x in Flash*; do
    count=`find . -xdev -samefile "$x" | wc -l`
    if [ $count -gt 1 ]; then
        echo "Not linking $x. Already linked."
    else
        echo "Linking $x."
        ln "$x" "dl-$x.flv"
    fi
done

Run it every thirty seconds like this: watch -n30 lnflv. Each flash file not already hard linked will be linked to /tmp/dl-Flashxxx.flv.

Order by time and rename video parts with something like this:

alpha=a
for f in `find . -size +10M -name dl-Flash\* | xargs ls -tr`; do
    cp "$f" [name]$alpha.flv
    alpha=`echo -n $alpha | tr 'a-y' 'b-z'`
done

Change [name] to the name of whatever you are watching. "-size +10M" filters out files smaller than 10MB; this screens out short ads and is only required for video streams that embed them.