Have you ever watched a Flash video on a website and wanted to save it to your computer? Chances are, if you were persistent, you found the SWF Flash file in the source and tried downloading that, but typically that isn’t the file you’re looking for. Usually websites use a SWF player that loads external Flash files that have an FLV file extension. To easily find these files and save them to your computer, you can use Firefox’s disk cache interface.

After loading the page that contains the video you’re interested in, open a new tab and type this into the address bar: about:cache?device=disk. That will bring up Firefox’s interface for the disk cache. You can see that it is a fairly long page and it shows you all the images, scripts and other files that are downloaded while browsing the web. It could take you a very long time to scroll through the entire page looking for the file you’re interested in, so you’ll naturally want to do a search. Hit CTRL-F (for find) to bring up the search box and type in “flv” without the quotes. This will take you directly to the first result. It may take you a few times to find the file you want, but you should be able to find it eventually.