Save Flash Ads From Internet Web Pages to Your Computer

This is another article from many of how to save flash content to your computer. Swf or flv files are hard to download because they have no right click save as function. They're embedded objects.

In this post I use a complex technique of saving flash ads and will refer to my previous posts for specific techniques.

So you found a nice flash based ad on a site and want to download it for whatever purpose (analyze content or just store as a good (bad, funny) example). First you have to locate the path to flash file. In other words address from where website is getting it. To accomplish this, you must look at the source code. You could do this by right clicking and selecting view source option but I recommend a better way. Use Firebug add-on for Firefox. (If you haven't got Firebug add-on read my article about it first) This method for viewing source code is better because it brings you at the right place of the entire html code which can be terribly long and locating right flash file link would be really hard.

1. To start locating flash file position open the page with flash ad and press Firebug icon in order to open Firebug window.

2. In the firebug window press Inspect (bellow File). Firebug window hides and now you have to locate the element on the page which yuo want to inspect. When you mouse over objects they are highlighted. Right click on the flash ad and Firebug window appears again with code highlighted in the right place.

3. Right click on the highlighted line of code and select edit html. You're taken to a new window with that particular code line

<embed width="728" height="90" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="clickTag=http%3A//a.tribalfusion.com/h.click/aDmyfbUArTPT3XSVvoQWUO1HfxWPrM4sM3Xb3IVm2n2AB8R6ZbC3dUt0HQAntTy56ZbQ3sv7UcQ9WsbeR63oWtv3TFM45bEuWabqTEJcQqQLRcQJRrAoRWQ7VcbT2FmomHaM0aPw4tMZbSFftf8WptZa/http%3A//www.puzzlepirates.com/index.xhtml%3Ffrom%3Dfulltango%26tag%3Dno2" bgcolor="#ffffff" quality="high" wmode="transparent" swliveconnect="True" src="http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/common/flash/frame2.swf?tf_flash=http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/890566/728x90_plunder_clickTAG.swf&tf_button=http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/common/flash/button2.swf" name="TFclick2071511101"/>

What you have to do is to locate links to flash content in this code block. One is http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/common/flash/button2.swf and other http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/common/flash/frame2.swf Check the founded links by simply pasting it in your browser's address line and see if the correct ad shows up. But what happenned? Only blank pages opens with these links. Don't worry it's because this particular flash ad loads in a frame and the real file is somewhere else.

4. Let's look again in the Firebug window. Look near the highlighted line for other lines which contain "param value" syntax. In this example I found that few lines above was a line

<param value="http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/common/flash/frame2.swf?tf_flash=http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/890566/728x90_plunder_clickTAG.swf&tf_button=http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/common/flash/button2.swf" name="movie"/>

Notice it has a link to swf file called 728x90_plunder_clickTAG.swf. Check it in your browser and see that flash ad loads in a window which means we found the right link.

5. Ok we've found the flash ad but how to save it to computer? The easiest way to do that is to use Firefox add-on for downloading embedded files.

This article is the most difficult from all my posts about downloading flash files (also Youtube movies). You have to use Firefox and 2 add-ons in order to easily complete the task.

Related: Firefox add-ons.