Downloading Vimeo Videos

Downloading videos from the Internet for offline viewing is getting harder and harder.

For YouTube videos, I usually just cut and paste the URLs onto Dirpy for easy downloading. For the trickier ones that don't actually show you the video URL, you can simply let the video play out, then pick it off from the browser cache folder. Of course, that assumes you know where the cache folder is and which of the hundreds of files is the video stream that you're after. (I usually base it on the filesize and timestamp.)

Some of the video sites are now onto this. While streaming, the video file saved as chunks in the cache folder. If you don't know how to merge the multiple files, then there's no way for you to play them back again.

Another way video sites beat offline downloaders is to obfuscate the video source. Even if you view the page source, you're not going to find any file reference anywhere. In the end, the browser needs to know where the pull the video stream from, so it must be there somewhere. One way I discovered of getting around this is to use the "inspect element" option. By highlighting the actual video window/iframe, I was able to narrow down to the relevant section and search for the video URL. After that, it's just a matter of pasting the URL onto JDownloader, and letting it do its magic.