05-23-2010, 10:38 PM

I'm trying to make a short little video from cutting up a film (it's public domain and not on DVD) that's on AOL Video. I can't find it anywhere else.

The Lottery EBEC 1969 - AOL Video

I've tried a bunch of sites that do it online, but they don't work. I've found PC programs that might do it, but they're all .exe programs. Any idea how to do it on a Mac?

05-24-2010, 04:55 AM

Never tried it on AOL video but give this a shot;
Download iTubeGrabber for Mac - Capture audio and video streams. MacUpdate Mac Software Downloads

05-24-2010, 08:41 AM

Honestly, it looks like you could download it just like you download a youtube video - go to the video, make sure the entire video caches (the black play line is completely gray - or just go ahead and watch the video until the end), then open activity monitor (opt+cmd+a), look for the entry that's huge (that particular video is around 74 megs), then double click it, and it should start downloading to your downloads folder. From there, you can use a free tool like mpegstreamclip ( Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac OS X ) to convert it from flv to mp4, .mov or whatever (you will need perian installed if you don't have it tho - Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components )

05-24-2010, 01:08 PM

I tried both methods. The iTunesDownloader downloaded it in like, half a second, then it didn't play. And opt+cmd+a didn't bring up Activity Monitor. I opened AM through Utilities and it didn't show in the list, it just showed all the active programs, not the individual things going on in the program.

05-24-2010, 02:45 PM

I misspoke - it's not the Activity Monitor - that won't tell you anything - it's the Activity Window - you press Cmd+Opt+A while in Safari (or, while in Safari, go to Window->Activity) That's where the list is.

05-24-2010, 03:23 PM

Seems to work. Thankya!

05-24-2010, 11:11 PM

Ugh. I tried to view the video and only the first few minutes work. Then it goes black, stalls, and closes.

I tried to download it again using that method, and it just... doesn't. Clicking it in the activity viewer opens another window, which jitters like it's doing something, then doesn't. I tried deleting the video file and starting over and it does this again.

05-25-2010, 08:44 AM

If clicking in the activity viewer is opening another browser window it's because the video wasn't fully downloaded - it's one of those weird things - which is why I had mentioned you had to wait until the full video was cached in the viewer until you could go to the activity window to attempt to download it.

I'll try to download the video when I'm at work (and have more bandwidth to play with) and see if the same thing happens to me (only a few minutes work)

**** UPDATE:
I tested downloading the video the way I suggested (navigate to the page, make sure the entire video caches, open activity viewer, double click so it downloads) and it played perfectly for me off my computer. The file size is: 78,310,234 bytes, if your file is smaller it won't work all the way through. Also I played it back in VLC (I prefer VLC for flv playback). I'm also able to transcode it using mpegstreamclip (as long as perian is installed) without a problem.