Activity window

To download YouTube videos, the free and open source Miro is very good.

http://www.getmiro.com

I got it recently when it became necessary to find a replacement for the Java-based YouTube download service I was using.

See here:

http://www.getmiro.com/using-miro/

Note the "Sources" section in the left column. You can add YouTube to it. Search YouTube using Miro. Miro provides a Download button. Sadly it doesn't seem to work for Vimeo.

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

2) Make sure that the window with your video is on top so you can see it. DO NOT PLAY THE VIDEO!!!

3) Go to the tool bar -> Develop menu (between Bookmarks and Window), select "Show Page Resources"

4) NOW you can play the video. Watch the LEFT-HAND panel as you press play.

5) A dropdown file should appear as soon as you press play. Its called "Other". OPEN IT.

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

7) 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.

8) Paste it into the Safari address bar. Hit Alt+Enter. Download will begin immediately.

9) Enjoy your video.

NOTES: DON'T play/load your video until the Page Resources thing shows at the bottom of your screen. Reload your webpage if you have to. Otherwise the important "Other" folder will not show up and you won't find your video file. GOOD LUCK.

this is the solution, guys!!! worked for me.

thanx a lot🙂

Good work, @FluffyMath.

I shared your text with my family.

Imran

O_Andrews with all due respect the only monumental thing about Safari 6 is the way it

monumentally slows down web sites upload and my Mac Pro is less then a year old and it has plenty of memory, reinstalling safari 5.1.7 did the trick and speed it my internet connection again, woof

Again I hate the fact that the search window is now integrated with the address window, it is now

necessary to type the .com in an address or safari will assume it is a search, stupid stupid stupid.

I hate the missing progress window one can basically seat waiting 15 minutes with put knowing if the web site will ever upload or not.

Apple is really messing things up.

is it just working with youtube sites FluffyMath?

FM,

I'm good up until step #9, because at step #8 what shows up in my Downloads is a file with the following characteristics:

Name: videoplayback.flv

Size: 1.8 MB

Kind: Movie

No matter what the duration of the YouTube video clip, the file size is always the same - 1.8 MB. Nothing will open it.

Lion 10.7.4

Safari 6.0 (7536.25)

Thoughts?

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 alot!!!!!! Works great just not as easy as it used to be....

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.

Or you could read the posts on the pages before this...