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If I'm right, if I play a video on Youtube, when I'm using Firefox on a Windows machine, the browser stores the video file in the temp folder. So, theoretically, I should find that video already downloaded in the temp. But I don't know how to find in Linux the correspondent of the "temp" folder. I have tried in the "etc" folder but got nothing useful. Do you have any ideas how to sort this out?

Yesterday I have been playing a video on Youtube all day long, and now I see it's gone "for copyright infringement, blah-blah", but I think the played file should be "hiding" somewhere on my system, only if I could get to it somehow... Can you help me with this?

Braiam
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Cristiana Nicolae
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4 Answers4

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You can put about:cache in the location bar, it should display where it keeps the "temp" folder.

ptantiku
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I think you mean firefox cache folder not ubuntu temp folder.

Firefox cache folder is located in ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/cache/

Simply, go to your home folder and press cntr + h to view hidden files. Then go to the .cache/mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/cache/ folder and search for your videos.

xxxxxxxx is a random string of characters.

A better approach is to install gnome-search-tool via terminal using this command sudo apt-get install gnome-search-tool.

Launch it via the dash, its called search for files, choose the firefox cache folder for the look in folder option.

Choose select more options and in available options choose size at least and set it at about 5Mb, thats about 5120Kb and search. Leave the name contains blank.

In the search results you will find all your videos and all you have to do is copy-paste them to another folder.

All the best.

Parto
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The temp folder on linux is /tmp/. Most of the linux softwares use it for storing temporary files, firefox does so too. For example when you say Open with ... for a file instead of downloading it firefox stores that file in /tmp/. But this folder is emptied on every reboot (since these are temporary files which shouldn't be kept across reboots) so you won't find the files there after a reboot.

A few years ago youtube video caches were also saved here, like it is mentioned in this question, but things have changed. You can see what happened in the two most upvoted answers to that question: There was a time when the cached videos were simply moved to another folder, but later they moved it back to /tmp/ but now they unlink the file so the file is not present in the file system but is still accessible with that trcik mentioned in the second most upvoted answer there. This latter method (from the second answer) is still working for most of the flash video websites, but it doesn't work anymore with youtube. Youtube have changed to not cache at all the video (or they cache in RAM, I don't know).

To sum up: That file is not on your drive, no need to search for it.

Community
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falconer
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  • you are correct. I played a lot with it, it seems that nowadays youtube do not cache the whole video at once on hdd. sometimes back in our university we could not able to see any larger video due to a cap of 200M on download of a single file, now it is fine. This tells the story. – sourav c. Jan 24 '14 at 18:46
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I think you are looking for the Firefox temporary files download directory. Just try looking into:

/tmp/mozilla_username

username = your Linux username

Raffa
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Dhamodaran Narayana Perumal
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