How To Save Streamed Video Data?

I have seen many people watching big movies online exploiting their bandwidth to its ultimate extent. Well, if you list these people you have to include me too, because I myself am a movie freak and watch movies online with my brother.

It often happens that as you are watching a video on a good day, a ringing sound comes up in your iphone and you got to go for some urgent work.. Oh!! What about the streamed movie?? Should I waste my bandwidth again?? Well, wasting the bandwidth is no problem when you have unlimited internet connections. But what about speed?? Many use connections like 256kbps or little more than that. (Well, I use EVDO, Okay to watch a movie after streaming). You can’t watch a movie while streaming with satisfaction.

Now, in this situation, you may need to save the streamed video, so that you can come back after your work and continue watching the movie without any hassle. Here is a simple trick that you can use to save the streamed data of a video.

You might have noticed that as you play a video on Youtube or any other vidoe site, there are temp (.tmp) files created in the temp folder on your system. If you haven’t noticed then, see it now. For example, when you play a Youtube video, you have a (Fla**.tmp) temp file created. And also notice that as you close the Youtube window the temporary file gets deleted.(You can access the temp directory by a simple hotkey Windows Button + R. You get a dialog box, where you have to enter %temp%)

So, what’s happening here is that the youtube file is getting streamed in the cache memory of your computer. The trick to save the streamed data is to copy that temp file, and paste it and watch whenever we want it. This would have been easy if you could just use simple Copy & Paste operation. But, you cannot do it as you are running the file on the youtube and FYI running files cannot be touched.

To copy this file we need to search for a software that helps us to copy the files that are in use. You can Google for this software if you want. But for now, I have got one in my pocket – Shadow Copy.

Now use this tool and copy the temp file into any other directory and then close the browser. After finishing your oflline work come back and paste the copied temp file into the temp directory. Now visit the SAME link that you had visited earlier and see that you can watch the completely streamed video directly!!:).(Note that the streaming will be done only upto the mark where you had closed it. After this point it continues to stream in the normal way.)

If you had any problem in doing this please share your problem here by commenting.