Stream of Ry

It’s Firefox Friday again and this time I’m going to teach you guys how to download YouTube videos using only Firefox and your file explorer.. and no, this is not the “go to this website, paste video link and you get a download prompt” sort of technique. I learned this method via my Dilnet friends so, many thanks to them. :3

So, why bother with this method when there are websites / applications that does exactly this?
When you load a video and watch it for the first time, it gets cached* already. That’s how we usually decide what videos to get — after we watch it. At this point, if you pass the video url to a YouTube downloader site/application, you actually download it again, thereby consuming precious bandwidth and time. So, why not just get the cached video instead?

Here’s how you do it in Firefox:

1. Well, first, let the video buffer finish. (Or not.**)
2. Open a new tab in Firefox and type in the address bar: “about:cache” (minus the double quotes). You should get something like this:
3. See the boxed text? Copy that text (or at least, try to remember that path)
4. Open your favorite file manager and navigate to the path of the boxed text. Alternatively, you can use the command “go to” (or any equivalent) and then paste the text to make the process faster.
5. If you’re in Windows, you should be looking at a bunch of garbage data with Hex filenames. If you’re in Linux, you’d still see the Hex filenames but chances are, you’ll see thumbnails which will give you an idea of what kind of files these are. (Which makes life a whole lot easier!)
6. Change the display to sort by filesize.
7. ***Now, append .flv or .mp4 to the biggest files that are not named __CACHE__ or variants
8. Copy the said files to your video storage. Don’t just leave it in the cache folder of Firefox.
9. And You’re done!

* assuming that it still fits in your allocated cache size.
** If you read ***, it is based on an assumption. Another way to pinpoint which file is the current buffering video is by monitoring the different file sizes in the cache folder and the one that changes very often is most likely the file that you were looking for.
*** This is operating on an assumption that the biggest files you have on your cache are video files.