Downloading videos

Today I had an issue where I was watching a webm format video that I wanted to save. Using Fiddler2 you can see the HTTP requests made for any webpage, and find the request for the video file. When it's finished downloading you can right-click on the request, choose save response as, and then save body only. This will allow you to save the video file.

However, in my case the video stopped loading part-way through. I then had to refresh the page to get the rest of the video to download. When I refreshed the page a new request for the video file was made, but this request continued downloading from where the previous request had left off. So I ended up with two requests / responses. One contained the first half of the video file, and the other contained the second half of the video.

I saved the body of both responses to files using Fiddler2. Then I concatenated the files together into a single file using the command line. Simply:

type first-half.webm second-half.webm > full-video.webm

In Linux you'd use cat, but it seems in windows you use type. Anyway, this worked nicely to give me a single video file.

An alternative would be to clear the browser cache, and then refresh the page. This way the video would start downloading from scratch again, rather than continuing from where it had previously got to.

Most of today was spent updating church website stuff.