Odd tmp/Flashxxxxx files

[Nigel Ridley]

Goh Lip wrote:
> Perry wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> (Hardy and Jaunty)
>> I have been struggling for 2 days trying to record sound or video playing in 
>> Firefox. (sound works and I can record from microphone)
>> For sound I read that Audacity should be able to record from the soundcard but 
>> it doesn't display a drop down menu to select the input (as it should)
>> Alsamixer displays 2 capture bars and volume is not 0.
>> I played with settings in Kmix, Alsamixer, Audacity; tried arecord...to no 
>> avail. I investigated streaming (don't know much about it) but the progamm 
>> asked for an URL and didn't  work with the URL of the page I was viewing. 
>> Plenty of googling and the most "reasonable" way around was to connect with a 
>> cable the sound output with the sound input...pityfull!
>>
>> So I tried to record the video (it often comes with the sound) and found out 
>> that while Firefox has an open tab with your video, /tmp will contain a file 
>> with a name like Flash0Zyhy5 (that you must copy elsewhere before closing the 
>> FF tab because the file is removed from /tmp). This Flash file was important 
>> because I couldn't download a file (didn't know how to find it if it existed 
>> *see on bottom of the page*)
>>
>> Now I tried those files with Dragon player, mplayer and Kaffeine.
>> Some files worked,others displayed:
>> in mplayer	LAUF_LEADER: av_find_stream_info(0) failed
>> ...		or Cannot find codec for audio format 0xA
>> in Kaffeine:	Codec package already installed
>> in Dragon Player:	vido played, image OK but horrible hiss on top of 
>> 		(recognisable) sound
>>
>> I find it odd that Firefox is able to play correctly a video and write 
>> a /tmp/Flash file that the other programs cannot play. 
>> Are these only bugs we have to live with, or does someone knows something 
>> helpful?
>>
>>
>>
>> I hope the following last note might help someone, even if I don't get answers 
>> to the original question which is still not concluded: say you want to record 
>> the sound from a game playing on your computer, you have no file at hand and 
>> nothing to download (so just plug a cable to connect the sound output with 
>> the sound...how elegant!)
>>
>> As a last note: Firefox extension "Downloadhelper" helped me download files 
>> related to the video I was viewing and there might be ways to extract just 
>> the sound from those flv files, it seemed to work even when the Flash file 
>> didn't, I still must experiment on that.
>>
>>
>> Thanks for any input	Perry
>>
>>
> 
> 
> I find this best, drag the 'button' to your browser bookmark toolbar.
> 
> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Goh Lip
> 
> 

About extracting MP3 files from downloaded youtube (.flv) files.
This is how I do it:

First you need to install ffmpeg
then:
To Convert .flv to .mp3 using ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i name_of_video_clip.flv -vn name_of_file.mp3

Obviously you need to substitute the 'name_of_video_clip.flv' for the actual file name.

If you have a bunch of downloaded files, you can:
'cd path_to_.flv_files'
then:
for i in *.flv; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn "${i%flv}mp3"; done

then:
mv *mp3 ~/Music/Mp3s  [or which_ever_path_to_dir] (to move the newly created Mp3 files to a 
separate folder).

Blessings,

Nigel