Background
One of the most common ways to demonstrate software is to record the screen and capture it into a Flash Video. This techinque is used both in the commercial and educational sphere but does result in the problem that you may come across the following situations.
* The video is no longer being hosted when you return to it at a later date.
* The video is inaccessible from your classroom or when giving a presentation.
Over the years I've tried various browser based extensions which haven't always worked or the user interface has been so poor that I could not recommend it to non-technical friends.
While searching for a more mature solution I came across JCopia by Jiteco which is competitively priced application which can save both flash video files and MP3s from websites.
JCopia
The application install is a standard MSI and as expected there were no problems installing it. Upon launch you are presented with an intutive interface which differentiates between music and video and also allows you to track completed and pending downloads.
Using the application is incredibly simple as it starts off in monitoring mode, as soon as I opened by browser and went to YouTube and selected a video it immediately started downloading it. The browser can be closed at this point and the download will continue and can be paused and restarted which is very handy for large videos.
More advanced users of the application can add their own mime types and extensions in which means that it's a moderately simple task to be able to download new formats as they are added and adjust to other websites. The other advantage of this method is that unlike many browser based solutions this software is not site independent will allow you to save flash files from many sources.
JCopia is made by Jiteco and can be found here.
