You can get YouTube stuff from the Internet Explorer cache. Haven't checked Google videos but I imagine they end up there too. The videos get cached in Firefox too, but they're not lableled as clearly (no file extensions) in the cache.

At the opposite side of the chain, anyone know the best format to prepare in for uploading. I signed up for Grouper.com only to find no technical info on what's the best encoding to use.

Ah Bob, finally I get to help you with something instead of vice versa!

I have found after a lot of trial and error that for both YouTube and Google Video the best format to send to them is Xvid AVI. Apart from being a great video format, this allows the MP3 audio that those sites prefer to receive.

My source footage is DV captured from my camcorder, standard definition, PAL. 720x576 interlaced. 16-bit stereo audio. I import this into VirtualDub.

In VirtualDub I use the following video filters:

- smart deinterlace 2.8 beta 1 standard settings
- resize (Lanczos3) to 320x240 for YouTube (so they are doing a 1:1 conversion to their flash video) and 480x360 for Google Video (because their downloaded versions are this higher resolution and I don't want them uprezzing. Note however that Google's Flash "streamed" versions are 320x240 like YouTube).

Then I choose Xvid under "video compression" and choose 1024kbps single pass for the YouTube 320x240 videos and 2048kbps single pass for the Google Video 480x360 videos. It's an OTT bitrate but I thought I may as well give them the best chance of making a nice job of the conversion.

For the audio I choose Lame MP3. I just installed the codec and then it appears under Audio -> compression. I use the 44100 Hz, 128kbps, Stereo setting which appears after ticking "show all formats" on the "select audio compression" page. Lame can be found via Google search.

Google Video normally approves the videos in just a few hours.

I think after conversion that the Google flash streamed videos have the edge over the YouTube ones in quality.

For examples of the results using this method see my Google Videos and click "from user" at the bottom right, or my YouTube page.

I don't know if Grouper will take the same format I've described but I expect so.

There's some related info here and some screenshots but using different settings to mine.

Nick

I've cache-hunted hundreds of flvs and flash animations... lots of experience.. here's my lessons learned:

After trying everything, the best way I've found to cache-hunt both flvs as well as swfs is simply to get the nice fast www.opera.com browser, then set the opera cache to

C:\operacache

on my hard drive.

Then, whenever I see an flv I want to keep (or a flash swf animation for that matter), I just click on opera, enter the url in the browser window, and voila! it's now in the opera cache. Note that often times it'll save flvs with an .txt extension, just rename the file to filename.flv and presto! you have the flv.

To view flvs, I use the excellent free flv player from:
http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-player-updated

and have updated my file associations so that's the default flv player. It now has a double-screen option too. If flvs don't scrub properly, there's a couple of utilities, one from burak, that adds the metadata to the timeline.


Anyways, that's how I watch flvs and snag them from the cache quickly and easily, fwiw.


ken

You tube movies go to the temp internet files folder. You need to search for a file that has the extension on the youtube url. So for Nicks movie you need to search for dUMUSFLyZpU. The file will be named: get_video?video_id=dUMUSFLyZpU. Copy that to a ned folder, rename with an .flv extension

I use keepvid most the time

Firefox has an extension called VideoDownloader that claims it can download from youtube and google.