Whether it's for a presentation, home multimedia library or just exercising fair use, it's not always practical to stream a video clip that's embedded in a webpage. On the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, there are a slough of retail applications designed expressly for the purpose of downloading embedded Flash videos from various sites. But what is a Linux user to do when faced with this dilemma? Fortunately, as with most challenges in Linux (and UNIX), the solution is surprisingly simple.

Ever been annoyed by a Mambo site that loads unreasonably slowly on the first hit, then subsequent page loads are an order of magnitude faster? Unfortunately I have too, and on more than one occasion. When this cropped up for me yet again, I was reminded of the apparent lack of good information on this subject. With that in mind, I decided to sit down and write the following article on how to solve it. If you're with me so far, read on.