Capturing Flash Video on Your PC or Your Mac

How many times have you seen a video on a website, wanted to save it, but couldn’t? Here are a couple of tricks that might help:

On a PC

This is actually pretty easy. When your PC finds flash on a website, it downloads a copy into a cache folder on your computer. All you have to do is find that folder, identify the video, rename it, and move it to whichever folder you like. This is also possible on a Mac, but it’s much harder to do, and for the sake of brevity, I’m going to leave it out of this article. If anyone wants to contribute to this article by detailing how to find a cached video on a Mac, that would be great. But there is another way to capture video (or anything else) on a Mac…

On a Mac

There is an application called SnapZ which does a wonderful job of capturing anything on your screen — whether still or moving. It’s as simple as this:

1. Identify the video you’d like to capture.

2. Open and configure the SnapZ app.

3. Select the video on your screen.

4. Hit record in SnapZ.

5. Play the video. SnapZ will record it.

A few tips:

- SnapZ records all movement on the screen — including your mouse cursor. Fortunately, it has a feature for hiding the cursor so it won’t appear in the captured video. Avail yourself of this option right away, if you intend to use the video in another context.

- You need to leave the video you’re recording on the screen for its duration — in other words, you can’t work on anything else. Remember, SnapZ records everything that happens on your screen.

As with any content on the web, copyright infringement is a very serious issue. Never “borrow” anyone’s content without explicit permission.

Paco Ahlgren

www.MyTechTool.com