Gecko -> Saving Streamed Lessons/Videos (Aug. 21 2006 11:21:08)
|
This is in reference to Vasileos’ thread in the General Section, subject “ Looking for Instructor in SF Area” and streamed, on-line lessons or other videos. A couple of members were interested in this process. Situation: Some of us have a “slower” internet connection which makes streaming videos a lengthy and choppy process. However, once the video is streamed it will re-play normally until you exit that page or the browser, then to return to the lesson or video you must re-stream it. I have been looking for a solution to this, principally a way to save the streamed video file to the hard drive and replay/review it without having to re-stream. So far I have found that you can and you can’t. The following is based on using Internet Explorer and XP: In Internet Explorer go to Tools>Internet Options>Advanced Tab and uncheck “Empty Temporary Internet Folder When Browser is Closed (towards the bottom of the list). The streamed video file will now be kept in your Temporary Internet Folder when you exit the browser. You may want to delete the files in this temporary folder before you do the streaming as it will make the video file a lot easier to find. Go to the lesson or video site and stream the file. It will now reside in the Temporary Internet Folder and will remain there until you delete it and/or reset the above step. You can now return to the lesson or video site and replay/review it without having to re-stream it. Here are the problems: The lesson files are huge, for example a 14 minute lesson is a little over 68,000 kb and keeping several of them in the Temporary Internet Folder will require you to resize that folder, substantially. This can be done in IE Tools>Internet Options>General Tab>Settings and move the slider to the right. Using Windows Explorer you can cut/copy and paste the video file from the Temporary Internet Folder to another folder and save it on the hard drive. However here is the “kicker.” Windows will not allow you to copy the video file back into the Temporary Internet Folder as it is a “Systems Folder.” There is a possible solution to this, which I haven’t tried yet. The lesson video files are .flv files which are some sort of embedded/encoded Flash Player files. There are .flv players available which, supposedly will allow you to play those files off-line. In addition there appears to be some conversion utilities available that will convert .flv files to .wmv files which can then be played in the Windows Media Player. I also tried to do this in Firefox, but the video does not end up in the normal disk cache files in FF, so it must reside in the memory cache which I can’t access. If anyone finds a better solution to this situation I hope they will post it for us folks in the “backwaters” who can’t get fast broadband connections.
|
|
|
|