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Download & Save Flash Animation Files in Firefox or IE

Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Download and save Shockwave Flash swf files from the web browser to your hard disk using Firefox or Internet Explorer.

There's a good chance that the animation or cartoon game you want to download was created using Flash. Use these tips for downloading Flash files from the Internet to your hard drive. You save all Flash animations from web pages, including Flash websites, Flash game, Flash Animations, Flash Tutorials, Flash Movie Trailers, Flash Advertisements, or what ever Flash files you find in the web.

Shockwave Games, Website elements, Screencasts (software demos) created in Macromedia Flash (swf) always fascinate me. I generally like to save these flash files embedded in webpages to my hard-drive for offline viewing.

But saving flash animations from websites is not so easy. Macromedia Flash player context menu has no option to download or save the Flash movie from the web browser. The right-click context menu of most browsers won't work on Flash objects. So I will share some techniques (work-arounds) to save flash files from Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), Opera or MyIE2 web browsers.

1. Saving Flash files from Firefox

Firefox for Newbies
a. Click Tools - Page Info
b. Click the Media Tab on the Page Info Windows
c. The media tab has a complete list (with preview) of Images, CSS Files and Shockwave Flash files that were downloaded by the Firefox browser while rendering (loading) the page.
d. Scroll down the list and locate the swf file.
e. Click the "Save As" button. Select some directory on your hard drive and save the file (No need for a third-party plug-in)

Firefox for Geeks and Power Users
a. Type about:blank in the Firefox address bar
b. Now click List cache entries or directly type about:cache?device=disk (Disk cache device)
c. Press Ctrl+F and try to location the flash file by typing some part of website URL or the flash file name or just .swf. After some hit and trial, you should be able to locate the swf file URL
d. Click the SWF URL to open the Cache Entry Information page. Right click on the link and choose "Save link as"

2. How to save flash in IE browser

a. Click Tools - Internet Options
b. In the General Tab, click the Settings button available in the Temporary Internet Files group.
c. Click View Files to open your Temporary Internet Files folder. Depending upon your IE settings, the Temp. folder can contain tens of thousands of files.
d. Click View - Details. Now click View - Arrange Icons By - Internet Address. Depending upon the webpage, there could one or more Flash files (Shockwave Flash Object) under the Inernet Address.
e. Once you find the right flash file, right-click and choose Copy. Then paste the swf file in any other directory. Be sure to
keep the page and IE open to avoid purging of the cache file.

For newbies, I suggest the following approaches:
1. Get a download accelerator like Flashget and tell it to automatically download the shockwave extention (*.swf)
2. Or download a free IE plug-in for saving flash files.

3. How to save Flash files from Opera browser
Just like IE, Opera stores the flash files in the browser cache.

4. Save flash in MyIE2
Either follow the exact procedure for Internet explorer or download the free Flash saver MyIE2 plugin.
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