youtube video location in firefox

Question

As I moved to newer version of firefox-8.0 I lost the location firefox use to store flash videos
previously it used to be in /tmp/FLASH****, but now it's not there
even in .mozilla/firefox/profile-name/Cache they have changed the storage scheme. So is there any way to know where these videos/flash are stored ? moreover if it get changed again then how can we locate the location of video being buffered.

Edit : Also about:cache and locating video didn't help.

Solution 1

Edit dated 20130204: What I'm using currently is this:

find /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/random.default/Cache/*/ -type f -size +1M -printf "%p\n" | tee ~/Desktop/zlist.txt && xargs -a ~/Desktop/zlist.txt mv -t /home/username/Downloads/fcache

I've made an alias for this in .bash_aliases.

Notes:
username and random.default will vary per user. An inspection of each file in the file manager should identify file types. I'm currently using Firefox 19.0 (beta).
1M can be increased to whatever one wishes.
It requires a folder, fcache, to exist in ~/Downloads.
It creates a file, zlist.txt, which can be deleted.
It doesn't work with some YouTube videos. I don't know why.
I'm sure someone better at this will have something more elegant.

Solution 2

Answering your immediate need: I don't know about /tmp/FLASH, but throughout my browsing experience flash videos are stored in the normal cache.

You should be able to find them using (the resource intensive search):

 find .mozilla/firefox -type f -exec mimetype {} \; | grep "shockwave"

Change the path to something other than mozilla/firefox for a more broad/specific search. The code searches for all files (-type f) in the folder, and executes "mimetype" on it. Then it filters out results that don't have "shockwave" in the results.

However, if you're trying to save bandwidth by not re-downloading the same youtube video, perhaps you want to use youtube-dl?

Comments

[Peeyush]

worked. I though it's not inside cache

[isaaclw]

fyi: vasa1's results return in... 0 seconds. mine: ~ 2 minutes. Checking the mimetype of all those files takes a while.

[Nate]

For version 4, Firefox capped the size of files in cache to 5 MB. Now, it's 50 MB or 1/8th of your total cache size, whichever is smaller according to comment #19 in bug 647391.

[Peeyush]

generally I want to save video after watching them. so youtube-dl doesnt make sense in that case. Does it pick from firefox cache too ?

[isaaclw]

youtube-dl does not pick from the firefox cache. And your response is reasonable, but realise that you can't watch until you download/save. So you might as well save them once... (again, if it's a bandwidth issue). Though I could see how you wouldn't want to switch to the terminal after every youtube video...

[Peeyush]

x% of videos are rejected after watching 10% on youtube. So if x is > 30 then also youtube-dl does not make sense. There should be some plugin on firefox which does this job (pick it from cache if available otherwise download ).

[isaaclw]

That reason makes sense. I wonder if you can preview them while you're downloading them (using youtube-dl).