Browsers … Web Surfers best friend

Have you ever looked at your “temporary internet files” or browsers cache? Well, if not then I tell you that you might be surprised what you could discover there, but Schh!

Nowadays with online video/audio streaming, flash, etc. everyones want to download their preferred content to be available offline (on their ipod, iriver, errmmm whatever) with bigger or smaller success.

Here is a way to easily “download” videos, etc without any special software just by using your web browser. Because FireFox and its fellows store the cache in one or more bigger files merged, it’s a bit harder to extract info for the n00b user, so I will rather focus on Internet Explorer, which stores the image/flash/audio/video content in a folder usually “%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files” . (on win2k, xp, and later)

So launch an instance of Internet Explorer, then delete all the files from the directory mentioned above, and navigate to the page with the video content you want to download for example. Start the video, and let it play, then check out the cache directory. Be sure to sort the files by size, because this makes it easy to identify the video file which is usually the bigger. Sometimes the video file’s extension may differ, but you can copy/rename it freely.

The major inconvenient with video/audio files is that you have to wait them to finish, but we can overlook that if you can’t get the file using other more conventional methods.

This way you can catch flash content (games, etc), also images and sometimes even bigger versions of the images on some restricted sites. Absolutely anything what you can see in your browser window gets cached, and that means that’s ours.

Also you can get playlist files to MMS:// streams. Yahoo uses this technique. They store the URL to the stream there, rather than inside the web page source.

Just as a side note – To capture MMS:// etc, streams use VLC, SDP Downloader – Yay!, etc.

Good Luck, and Keep your eyes on your browsers cache. Use your imagination because the possibilities are unlimited.