Judging by some of the conversations that go on in the forum, there are clearly many people around here who know a hell of a lot more about computers than me, so I am hoping someone can help.

I want to rip videos from youku.com. I had a look on the internet, but none of the suggestions worked (I did get a free trial for flv recorder but that has just expired). Is there a free way to get videos off of youku?

Also, I want to take the audio off the videos I download so I can listen to it on my MP3, what is the best, free, way to do this?

Thanks

It's probably a violation of their copyright and/or TOS.

With that said, you can try some of these for downloading the videos:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=flash+video+downloader

For extracting the audio, try http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-rip-audio-from-youtube-videos.html

or http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=extract+audio+from+flash+video

P.S. Looks like they are using some funky JavaScript to load the video, someone might need to write a custom Greasemonkey script or something.

OK, looks like someone already did: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/28015

doesn't work for me, though.

http://www.flvcd.com/

if the video page is open the flash player saves the video somewhere in a temp directory.

(here on linux it is /tmp)

i always use mplayer to play the flash videos, since the performance is a lot better than that of the normal flash player.

Continuing on from above, you can get a 'cache downloader' plugin for firefox, so I think once you've downloaded/played the video on the site you can right click in the bottom right corner and save it.

Or just use 穆's link.

@穆 nice, that works great

Coolio, thanks for the help.

I just added the Convert.Files add-on to my Firefox (it is listed as experimental). It is supposed to show a convert button whenever you are on a site that has video it can convert/download.

I did not see the button and found out I had to go View->Toolbars and enable the bookmarks toolbar.

I clicked Convert.Files on one of the Youku videos and it took me to www.convertfiles.com. It can download videos and convert them to many formats. I just tried converting a video to MP3 and that worked great too.

If you have noscript you will have to permit convertfiles.com to run scripts though.

The only disadvantage of this method that I see is that convertfiles.com has to download the video directly from Youku and then convert it and then you have to download it from them.