Flash Download

A while ago I blogged about Free Download Manager. While it is good at….downloading, it is still unable to capture some downloads (flash downloads) from sites such as Metacafe or any non-video flash like Newgrounds-style animations. So the program to use, in that case, is Orbit.

Orbit is able to monitor all your browser’s downloads, and so from that can ‘read’ the address of anything you see on your screen (which is flash-related…). While I know a manual way of doing this (letting the video run through, going to the Firefox cache) it is quite annoying, so I suggest you do this to download the most ultimate flash videos ever, Metal Gear Awsome and Metal Gear Awsome 2 (these won’t make sense unless you have actually played Metal Gear Solid).

So I’ve only used Orbit once, but it didn’t crash, and works as advertised, and is free. Note that it does not integrate properly with Google Chrome, in which case I think you can still manually paste the Youtube page in.

Orbit Download – How to download stuff after the break.

Extended Review link

On a side note, for free software “http://www.freewaregenius.com/” is a great site

UPDATE 21/09/2009 about RMTPE Downloads

Orbit downloader does not download files which use the RTMPS, which is used on sites such as Crunchyroll. I don’t think you should be downloading off Crunchyroll in any case, since it legally hosts anime/dramas. There is a GUI-less program which I attempted to use once and failed at using, called RMTPDUMP (link below). There is also a GUI program which I tried and which somewhat works, but you have to pay for it (no links to that here, I forgot the name of the program >_<)

If you are downloading off Crunchyroll, you will have to do extra work to download the subtitles, in addition to overcoming the rmtpe encryption….so I reccomend giving up altogether. I forgot the name of the program which has a gui and does download streaming video using the RMTPE protocol, but I DO remember that it was not a free program. I remember that the link to the RMTPE file has a hex encoding in it… you’ll need to run it through that before the file name comes up proper (ie change hex code  to regular symbols like “:” and “/”).

In other words, I’m not going into the detail of downloading RMTPE files because I don’t know how, and because I failed on my last attempt to download RMTPE files.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Streaming (RMTPE INFO)

http://lkcl.net/rtmp/ (RTMP DUMP  INFO (name is deceptive, also does RMTPE streams)). This is a console only program.

Downloading

To acutally use it to download these things, on the installer you have to let it install into your browser, and then when the prgram starts go to tools->grab++. Press ok, so that the monitoring window appears. Then anything you see which is flash related on the browser will also appear as a thing on the program. Make sure you get the right one, or else you’ll download some random vid (look at file size to get a guesstimate)