FLV Video Downloader

FLV Video Downloader is a Shareware graphical Flash Video download manager for the Microsoft Windows Operating System. Its primary purpose is to let one save embedded Flash videos from websites like YouTube, Google Video, XTube, and others to a computer. It achieves that by capturing all incoming HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP traffic on a particular network connection.
Among the program's features are the ability to convert Flash Video FLV files to compressed AVI files for playback on portable media players, and the ability to save high quality videos from YouTube as MPEG-4 video files.
Due to the nature of its operation, there are several benefits and drawbacks. The obvious benefit is that it does not waste any bandwidth, as it simply saves the data that is being downloaded by a web browser. Because it saves videos as they are being downloaded by / being played in a browser, it supports all browsers that are capable of playing Flash videos: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, and others. One of the drawbacks is that because it relies on low level networking APIs, it requires to be run under administrative account. Another drawback is that it will not save videos if they have been already downloaded by web browser and are being played from browser's cache (in which case one would need to either reload a web page with video, or clear the browser's cache).
Note that the name of the program is misleading. As was explained above, it does not download anything by itself. Instead, it relies on the web browser to do the job. The program simply saves the relevant data (Flash video files that is), which the web browser is receiving, to files on disk. For that reason, it is also unable to re-download a video, because, unlike a web browser, it does not make any web requests to initiate file transfer by the server.

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