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I read that you-tube buffered videos are the in RAM while playing them and you need not download them again. just copy the flash file to another location. However,when I copied it to the home directory, it says permission denied and the file .flv on the desktop when played using vlc says vlc cannot play file of format "undf". What can be the problem?

Here's what I did:

pgrep -f flashplayer

Got the PID for the video.

Navigated through the RAM:

cd /proc/pid/fd

ls -l to view the number associated with the video.

Copied it to the home directory: cp XX /home/username/12.flv

That's all!

Eliah Kagan
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    You should explain how you copied it from RAM. That may help explain why things didn't work. If you do explain, please do so by editing the question itself. Also, please provide a link to "I read that youtube videos are buffered in Ram while playing them and you need not download them again. just copy the flash file to another location." –  Feb 16 '13 at 17:02
  • @vasa1 The OP is probably referring to a YouTube video being loaded in a web browser but not intentionally saved to the hard disk. Of course, it's likely saved on disk even in this situation, so it's not really accurate to say it's buffered in RAM (though a tmpfs filesystem will usually cause it to be written only to RAM). Since this is really secondary (if not completely irrelevant) to the permissions problem, it's not a reason to close this question. We will need more information to answer this, though. Heena: How did you copy the file to another location? Please describe what you did. – Eliah Kagan Feb 17 '13 at 00:39
  • @EliahKagan, I didn't downvote or vote to close this since I'm genuinely interested in knowing what OP did! I use an extension in Firefox or dig out the video from cache. I guess getting the vid from RAM or cache is an "economically" preferred option for those with capped broadband. –  Feb 17 '13 at 02:40
  • @EliahKagan: i have edited the post according to your requirements. Thank you. –  Feb 17 '13 at 09:00
  • What you accessed is not (generally speaking) in RAM. Instead, you accessed the file on disk through its open file handle entry in /proc. /proc is a virtual filesystem that doesn't exist on disk, but some of its entries actually are on disk. I'm not sure exactly why this didn't work, but it seems likely that the file was only partially buffered, such that it was usable by the browser's flash player (which separately kept track of what parts existed and what parts did not, and took care of fetching the parts it needed) but not by VLC. Or, you may simply have copied the wrong files. – Eliah Kagan Feb 17 '13 at 14:19
  • The best solution to your problem is most likely to download the videos with a utility designed for this purpose. We have questions about that, including How do I download a YouTube video? and How to download flash (streaming) videos from sites like youtube, dailymotion, vimeo, etc.?, which should help you (see also the "related" questions listed in the right sidebar on those questions). – Eliah Kagan Feb 17 '13 at 14:21

2 Answers2

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"undf" means "undefined".

Put simply, the file is corrupt or unrecognized, so your attempt to save the stream has failed and created an unplayable file.

natecornell
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While it's not directly an answer to your question, if you want to download videos from YouTube, use youtube-dl. It's in the repository but needs to be updated separately (run youtube-dl -U as root; you may need to do it twice).

Damn Terminal
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    You're right; this issue is to figure out what OP's trying to do and why she isn't successful. –  Feb 16 '13 at 18:34