Oh, and another trick is actually grabbing FLV files OFF of a site
such as YouTube, and storing it for your own off-line use. Legality of this
obviously depends on the license of the video, and may vary depending on
where in the world you are. Fair use, etc. etc.
Here's something I have sitting around called "youtube2mpg.sh", which I
haven't actually used in a long while. It's based off a script someone
wrote for KDE and posted to kde-apps.org. I didn't like the UI, and
decided a plain shell script would be plenty good:
#!/bin/sh
FFMPEG_OPTIONS='-ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240'
you="http://youtube.com/get_video.php?";
if [ $1x = "x" ]; then
echo Usage: youtube2mpg.sh URL FILE.mpg
exit
fi
if [ $2x = "x" ]; then
echo Usage: youtube2mpg.sh URL FILE.mpg
exit
fi
wget "$1" -O /tmp/y1
youswf=${you}`grep player2.swf /tmp/y1 | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1`;
echo "Downloading $youswf"
wget "${youswf}" -O /tmp/y.flv
ffmpeg ${FFMPEG_OPTIONS} -i /tmp/y.flv "$2"
mplayer "$2"
Again, I haven't actually tested it in a while, so am not sure it works.
This is an example of a kind of 'screen scraper,' I guess, and those can
break the minute the website it's trying to scrape changes. :^/
Anyway, this may be useful for 'bringing videos into school'...
stuff someone finds on YouTube that'd be good in a class, but... your
school doesn't let you access YouTube from school grounds.
Good luck and enjoy!
-bill!