With most websites you surf these days have some type of video content embedded in them. Be it news sports or entertainment sites. And 9 out of 10 times they are Macromedia Flash Videos (flv). If they are youtube links, there’s a good chance you can download them for future viewing. Otherwise its difficult to get hold of the flv file you are viewing. If you are lucky a simple view source will fetch you the direct link to the .flv file on the site. Even if thats not the case here’s a way to watch the video again, without wasting your bandwidth usage.
If you use Firefox or Flock, you can grab this from the browser Cache stored on your filesystem. On Linux you can find this under your $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<-profileid->/Cache. These files don’t have any extension and will have names like 05520CD8d01 etc. Proceed to this folder and you can watch all the FLVs cached so far using the following command .
ls | xargs -i file {} | grep Video | cut -d ‘:’ -f 1 | xargs -i vlc {} .
The above will directly play those files with vlc player. If you dont have vlc installed replace it with any other player you want to use. IMO, I have found vlc to render flvs better than mplayer or other players due its better audio-video sync capabilities.
Remember to backup the files you are viewing to any other folder. The files under Cache will be expunged once browser is closed.
You can copy all flvs in one shot to your $HOME with the following command.
ls | xargs -i file {} | grep Video | cut -d ‘:’ -f 1 | xargs -i cp {} ~