Copy Pepper flash videos from Chrome storage - lmmx/devnotes GitHub Wiki

No longer works? VLC won't play files anymore, lacks decoder for file type 'undf'. All files are suspiciously 4 bytes, 8.2kB, or 1.4MB.

Streaming video can be slow and it's difficult to skip ahead in certain players.

A recent conference streamed its videos online, but not within a service like YouTube which publicly available downloader sites will work with.

Streaming a video in Google Chrome generates flv files automatically on your local machine, which can be accessed simply. I read a blog post describing how Chrome's flash player (pepper) can be accessed from the command line on unix machines, from a store which is deliberately made to appear empty.

• This wasn't the post, but describes how they're "almost deleted"

While completing other work, I left all videos from this conference streaming - note that they must be left uninterrupted, and set to the highest quality where available. Skipping will create fragmented flv cache files.

ps ax | grep -i chrome | grep -i flash ^via

16452 ?        Sl    19:29 /opt/google/chrome/chrome --type=ppapi --channel=[not needed] --ppapi-flash-args --lang=en-GB

The flash plugin used to be libgcflashplayer but is now ppapi (Pepper Plugin API). In my case the process ID (pid) is 16452:

sudo ls -al /proc/16452/fd will show all symbolic links, including those 'deleted', so jump into sudo -i:

procnum=16452
ls -al /proc/"$procnum"/fd | grep Chrome | awk '{print $9}'

Each symlink here is a number (seemingly below 100), pointing at /run/shm/.com.google.Chrome.{6_character_alphanumeric_code}, all marked (deleted).

Automate the mass move to normal files with awk (sorry):

cpcommands=$(ls -al /proc/"$procnum"/fd | grep Chrome | awk -v procvar="$procnum" '{print "cp /proc/"procvar"/fd/"$9" /home/louis/Desktop/vid"$9".flv"}')
while read line; do eval "$line"; done < <(echo "$cpcommands")

^{NB awk won't take variables identically named to shell variables, so procvar ⇢ procnum}

chmod 777 /home/louis/Desktop/vid*.flv afterwards.