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Recently I had lots of time on my hands visiting relatives and in-laws. Most of the time I was able to get an Internet connection. Sometimes I had to leech my connection from unsecured wireless access points. Some of my relatives and friends posted videos on youtube.com but they wanted to save other flash videos on their hard drive or USB drive. At first this can be frustrating if you don’t understand what is going on. So I decided to download them the hard way. For the faint-of-heart, you can scroll all the way to the bottom of the article for the easy way to download flash video and audio files. Why do this the hard way? First I wanted to understand why it was less than straight forward to do. I understand why proprietary software developers are scared right now. Software is slowly moving to Internet applications. As most of you know, the Internet is wide open, even SSH and SSL to some degree. With youtube.com, Google video and some of the more popular video sites you can download and install software to automatically grab the video or audio flash file. However, I had a lot of time on my hands and there are many sites where a video downloader does not work for the particular site. If you find doing it yourself interesting then here’s one way to download flash video files. Keep in mind this only works with embedded flash video or audio streams.…more