It doens’t work on Youtube since they stream their Flash content but is usable on a lot of other file and video hosters like Dailymotion, Vimeo, Sockshare, Streamload, Putlocker and many others.

Installation:

wget http://mein-neues-blog.de/files/ripflash
chmod a+x ripflash
sudo mv ripflash /usr/local/bin

If you like you may want to create a starter in your menu.

Usage:

Open the video in your browser and wait until it was loaded completely.

 ripflash [path]

It lists all video file descriptors opened by your flash plugin and lets you select which of them should be copied. They have some cryptic ID’s which isn’t that comfortable but for this quick’n'dirty solution it seems good enough.

If path is omitted it will ask you where to save the file to. It is named automatically after the given ID so the dialog and the command line option wants to know a folder to save to.

ripflash /home/user/Desktop

or

user@machine~$: ripflash Desktop

…will copy the files to your Desktop without asking for a path.