I usually save youtube videos by getting them out of the cache but for some reason firefox has started deleting youtube videos right away, the second they finish downloading. There aren't any youtube download services that can download the original HD versions (&fmt=22 etc).

I enlarged its cache to over 1GB and still it's deleting 60mb youtube videos right as they finish, even with nothing else in the cache.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_...config_Entries

The above page is a whole whack of about:config entries you can use with firefox. Check in particular the 'browser.cache' area for options that can change the performance/functionality of the cache.

No guarantees this will *exactly* address the issue, but it's a start. Plus, there are lots of other real interesting thingies there

Sasha

Thanks for the link. I tried turning off memory cache and increasing the offline mode capacity but neither option seems to have helped. Smaller youtube files are still cached, it just seems like the HD ones have problems. Maybe something to do wtih the filesize of the individual cache files.

It had occurred to me that some videos may be really HUGE! Have you tried making your available cache size really gigantic? Like ridiculously gigantic, as a test anyhow?

S

Maybe, slightly offtopic, but I use downloadhelper to get movies in firefox. It's just easier, and you don't have to worry about caches and stuff...
http://www.downloadhelper.net/

(Hope I don't sound like a door-to-door vacuum salesman... )

If you create a hard link to the file as it's downloading then when 'oldname' is deleted the video can still be played using 'newname'.

ln oldname newname

My goodness, isn't that clever!!

@ the OP -- does this work?



Sasha

Yeah I enlarged it to 10GB and it's still doing it.

I think the filesize is the problem. I only noticed files being deleted when I started trying to download 720p youtube files, regular youtube files still work.I'll admit that is pretty clever lol. The new file [pointer] doesn't get deleted but it appears the video is never fully downloaded in the first place. gxine thinks I have the entire video but it'll stop playing half way through

I do like Uncle_Theodore's download helper though. The advantage of pulling a file from cache is that it *always* works, no matter what website you're on. These download helpers only support so many sites (though this one seems to support basically everything, including hd youtube).

On a side note, firefox doesn't seem to like saving filenames with japanese/chinese characters in it (kana isn't even supported) so despite being a little more convenient to use the download helper I still have to manually rename the files anyway.

Try looking in your /tmp directory when downloading large videos.
Firefox is probably saving the full video there and deleting it as soon as it has been viewed.

Holy crap there are like 13 youtube videos there. Right in the root tmp directory. This is great, thanks.