Safari Download Tip

I was helping a friend out earlier today found this hidden feature in the Downloads window for Safari.
If you have the full web address of a file, you can paste the address into the Downloads window and it will start downloading that file.

A great shortcut to download a file without having to paste it into your main browser address bar. This works great for getting separate content on a given webpage. For example, when viewing a YouTube video, if you open the Activity window (Window–>Activity) you can see all the files for the current webpage, this includes the Flash video file for the YouTube video, it’s usually the biggest file and contains the word “get_video”. If you copy this address and paste it into the Downloads window it will download just the YouTube flash video file to your computer. You’ll have to rename the file to have the .flv extension, but it does work in getting a copy of the file.
Incidently, I found out how to do this from the Perian.org website. Perian is a free QuickTime component you can download that will allow you to view other video formats in QuickTime. If you install Perian you can double-click the .flv file and it will open and play in QuickTime.
Very cool. And if you have QuickTime Pro, you can convert the Flash video into QuickTime format to be used in iMovie or import into iTunes.

And yes, this is a Safari only feature, I didn’t get this to work in Firefox or Flock.

Let me know if I missed anything.

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