Activity window

People...

I know it's not good netiquette to answer "use this instead" when someone wants a solution for a certain app. I am not trying to stur emotions now... but...

This is now 9 pages long and with one solution more complicated than the other. I just want you to know that there are numerous plugins to Firefox that will download videos like there is no tomorrow. And there is one smart extension for Safari + Youtube as mentioned earlier.

I think there also are solutions out there for "send this page to Firefox/Chrome".

Just my 2 cents. 🙂

I've been searching this on google for days now with very little success. However, I did find a method that works. I put this together from bits and pieces of what i've found on google, then expanded on it. It's not as easy as it was with the original activity window, however it does the job and I hope that this works out for you.

1) First off you need to enable the Developer menu in safari: Safari>Preferences>Advanced and put a check box next to "show developer menu in menu bar". Once you've done this, you'll find a new menu at the top of the screen named "Develop". Now if you've been searching google you've probably seen this already, tried it out, and failed. Keep reading though, it gets better 😉

2) Next, navigate to the website from which you would like to download the streaming video/music/content. Do not click on the content yet to start it. You do not want safari to start downloading/streaming before you are ready to capture it.

3) Once you are at the site you want, go to the "Develop" menu and click on "Start Timeline Recording" The bottom third of safari will now show you all the different file/content that are currently being streamed to your computer. It shouldn't show anything yet since you havn't started streaming your video yet.

4) Once you have clicked on that, you should now start to play the content which you want to download.

5) Now that it is streaming and downloading, it will show up in the Network Requests Timeline. If you are trying to download a flash video or sound file, I would expect it to be bigger than 1MB, so on the right side of the network requests window, sort the files by size so that the largest files appear on top. When you believe you see the file that you wish to download, go back up to the "Develop" windows and click on "Stop Timeline Recording".

6) Next to the file that you wish to download in the Network Requests Timeline, there should be a little arrow that is pointing to the right. Click on it and it will try to play the video. It has a hard time loading for me, but that isn't important. What is important is that on the right side of the window, it gives you the full address of the video file.

7) Highlight the address, copy it, and paste it into the address bar of safari and press enter. The file will now begin to download to your "downloads" folder or wherever you have designated your files to be downloaded to.

And your done!!!!!!

It's definately not as easy as the old windows activity window, but it works, and in some ways is easier..... Once you get in the habbit of doing it correctly. If anybody is still having trouble, make a reply on here and I will see about doing a picture or video tutorial.

And to anybody who works for Apple that might read this, the activity window was one of the single greatest features that I have ever seen on a web browser. I suspect it may have been removed beacuse of people downloading material(s) that they were not suppose to download, but for all the bad that might have been done with it, it was an amazing tool and a real loss for safari which I think will drive people to other browsers. Please re-activate the activity window and don't cripple safari any further.

Yep! That works pretty good. The only thing I do different is copy the address and then open quicktime — open URL (command L) and then paste the address into that. Then I can save the movie as I wish.

Thanks for the tutorial, but I couldn't make it work. My monitoring window had too much confusing info, didn't seem to conform to your description, and kept changing formats. Q: will this technique work with any site or just YouTube, Fact is I'm not as computer sophisticated as most of your readers. A tutorial for dummies (video or otherwise) would be great. What about secondary market downloaders? Any recommendations? Thanks again.

First off, this will not work with youtube. Almost every youtube video I've seen so far now downloads only a part of the video at any given time. If the video you are watching is 10mb in size, then it may download only 2mb of that video, once you are almost done watching the clip that is 2mb, it then downloads the second 2mb clip. It does this in a way that makes the video a constant stream, but in the background, it is really downloading 5, 10, 15 etc... clips that are combined and set to play one after the other so to give the appearance that it is one long video clip. Now for youtube, I use a program called iSkysoft iTube Studio which is free for use with youtube. But there are others out there. The iTube studio makes it very easy to download from youtube, you really don't have to be "computer sophisticated".

As for you monitor window, once your videos start to play, make sure that you go to the develp menu and choose stop recording, or you monitor window will flood with information and make it very hard to consistently sort through the information. Hope this helps you out.

Thanks, your post explains why I was getting only a 1.8 Mb file when I tried to download YouTube videos. I'll look for the iTube Studio product you mention.

Thanks also for the tip to "stop recording" to avoid excess clutter in the monitor window.

I spammed that "feedback" link.

How the heck does someone go into work and sit down and then think "I'm going to get rid of something for no good reason that's going to PO an entire user community"

Why not have a forum based development method.

Throw your ideas in here apple.. then get our answers BEFORE you do a thing...

bet dollars to doughnuts had you started a thread "Removing Activity window in Safari 6.. what do you guys think"

before you released it, that it'd still have the feature...

<Edited By Host>

Joël Huxtable wrote:

Yep! That works pretty good. The only thing I do different is copy the address and then open quicktime — open URL (command L) and then paste the address into that. Then I can save the movie as I wish.

You're great man ! I can even download Apple ad video from Apple website, thanks ! 🙂

I will try to help you, hope this easier and yes you can download from other sites with this :

1.) Go to Safari Preferences -> Advanced tab -> check the box saying "Show Develop Menu"

2.) Go to the tool bar -> Develop menu (between Bookmarks and Window), select "Show Page Resources" or press Command + Option + A

3.) Watch the LEFT-HAND panel as you press play the video or refresh the page.

4.) A dropdown file should appear as soon as you press play or after you refresh. Its called "Other". OPEN IT.

5.) Somewhere in the "Other" folder will be your video file. It's the one with the loading sign next to it. Select it.

6.) Then go to the RIGHT-HAND side panel. There will be a section titled "Location" and under that the "FULL URL" of your video file. Copy it.

7.) Open quicktime, choose "Open Location"

8.) Paste address...

9.) Video will start

10.) File>Export

This is an epic fail on Apple's part. This is a ridiculous pain in the a. I've read the 9 pages of work arounds and they are incredibly extensive and troublesome. I'm seeing 10 step "solutions" to accomplish something which was previously simply "option+click."

Apple needs to bring back the dang Activity Window and be done with it.

While I too, agree the Activity Window needs to come back, I've found an alternative version to accomplish the goal.

After enabling the 'Develop' menu item under >preferences>advanced, when on on a page with the source media, select, Develop>Show Page Resources> but rather than try to find the link in the sidebar, select the 'small hand' from the sub menu bar that pops up. It should provide the meta data pop up "select an element in the page to inspect it'. Then just click on the youtube video or whatever else and it will highlight the source code in the main window. Double Click then right click and select 'download sorce file'.

In a way, it is easier then trying to find the active media than from the old activity window because you can be taken right to the active source you chose.

I read through the thread and got frustrated trying to get to the "other" folder before it disappeared and found the same solution you came across. I would add to your advice that people should make sure they right click the youtube video and select the POP OUT option from the menu. Inspecting the page elements of a standard youtube page will only show you the EMBED MOVIE PLAYER info not the video source.

If people follow your advice then they shouldn't have any problems

I'm trying to follow this thread. I've been trying some of these methods, but Quicktime keeps telling me it can't handle the files, or gives the message "the operation could not be completed". Do I need Quicktime Pro? Are there Codecs I need to download?

I also tried this method:

"After enabling the 'Develop' menu item under >preferences>advanced, when on on a page with the source media, select, Develop>Show Page Resources> but rather than try to find the link in the sidebar, select the 'small hand' from the sub menu bar that pops up. It should provide the meta data pop up "select an element in the page to inspect it'. Then just click on the youtube video or whatever else and it will highlight the source code in the main window. Double Click then right click and select 'download sorce file'."

I use the Pop out option and get a window that looks like the screen shot (thank!). However, when I double click on the source (highlighted in blue) this selects the text string. When I right click I do not see "download source file" (I assume you meant to type 'source', but I don't see anything similar so it doesn't really matter).

Any suggestions or idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks!

If users just want to be able to download videos from YouTube, etc., I just tried a free Wondershare YouTube downloader http://www.wondershare.com/guide/mac-free-youtube-downloader.html. They also have a paid version which they say can download pretty much any embedded online videos.

As a developer, I do like this new page resource window (and the other great tools in the develop menu)....VERY useful for troubleshooting things (akin to http_fox for Mozilla). However, it has added about eight more clicks to the process of saving off a streaming flash (or other) movie. Not cool. Can't we have our cake and eat it too, Apple?