save a flash video and re-play it offline on Mac

[lilly333]

Hi

I'm looking for a way to get this little flash video:

http://www.bozzetto.com/neuro.htm

When I open the activity window (under "window") I'm able to save it to my desktop. However, it woun't play neither in quicktime, nor in falsh, nor everything else I've tried and says it's protected. Any ideas somebody? Thank you for your help!

oh... "getflash" seems to be very good, it just doesn't work on Mac...

[Baldrick]

tried firefox with the downloadhelper ?

[lilly333]

Thanks for your suggestion... I can download it (works fine with Safari, as well as with the Firefox downloadhelper). But when I want to open the file with VLC I get an error message saying: "ffmpeg: Seeking too far : EOF?" (whatever that means?!?)

Any other ideas? Thanks for your help.

[Ai Haibara]

What version of VLC are you using?

Does the file play properly in another player? I can't remember if mplayer plays FLVs, but you can also try one or more of the following players:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20228/swf-%26-flv-player
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22154/flv-viewer
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/26725/fplayer
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22760/flvthing

...I personally haven't tried any of them, though. Also, if you have a system that can use Perian (my old iBook still uses Panther ), you might be able to play the FLV through Quicktime.

[lilly333]

...as for the VLC-player version I'm using: it's 0.8.6f and I've updated it yesterday

I've tried all the other players - but unfortunatley none of them works with the flv-video...is there anything else I could try?

thanks for your help!

[Ai Haibara]

Okay, I've checked the actual page (yes, I realize I should've done that in the first place ), and I've discovered the problem: the video is an SWF, not an FLV. (The actual filename of the video, that I saw, was 'neuro4.swf'.)

If you have it saved with the .flv extension, rename it to .swf. VLC doesn't play SWF, however. The first player I mentioned in the list above claims to also handle SWFs, but as I mentioned, I haven't tried it. (For SWFs, on my iBook, I use both the Macromedia/Adobe standalone Flash player (actually, I haven't updated it in a while... ) and iSwiff (http://echoone.com/iswiff/ ).)

[lilly333]

Yes!! That's it!!! Hey Ai Haibara, thank you so much for taking the time to help me! That solved the issue. as a .swf I can actually play it either with the SAFlash Player or with SWF & FLV Player that I have found on the Apple downloads pages for free

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/swfflvplayer.html (in case anybody else is looking for a swf/player...)

Again thank you! I'm so happy that I can download and play files like that... that way I can show them to my mom who doesn't have a fast internet connection...

lilly333