• It used to be that to download a flash video on your mac you needed to get a video downloader for safari, but now the best way seems to be to go a webpage that will do the hard work for you. It will convert the movie from a flash file to a normal (.mov) file and create a link and then you can download the file directly from safari.
• If you are playing a video in Safari, there will be a 'Download' button on the top of the playing window. Click the 'Download' button, and the program will be launched. Part 2: How to download YouTube videos.

The best free YouTube downloader for Mac makes it easy to download YouTube content in any format to save important video or watch it later without Internet access.

Option-clicking a link usually works.

Or option-enter in the url bar. That's especially convenient when you accidentally just clicked the link and it opened in the browser, because then you just do command-L followed by option-enter.

Drag & Drop to Downloads is also nice..

This was a new one to me, thanks.

I usually use the Terminal and curl which is available on all recent Mac OS X installations.

For people not used to the terminal it might be a bit daunting at first, but it is rather simple. I have gotten non-geeks at work to find the terminal appealing after showing them how to do it. The advantage with curl is that it can handle almost any kind of download.

or even easier tell curl to use the file's name on the server:

These are all OK if you're looking at a link to the actual file. Sometimes there's a level of indirection or two involved and you'll just end up downloading a .htm file or some other intermediate file. In most of these indirect cases you can get to the streaming content by double-clicking on the appropriate line in the Activity Window. Of course, sometimes more inventive tricks are required...

Why on earth would you need to do this over option-enter or command s (save) or a cURL command?
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Agreed. This is basically the worst out of those three possible methods to force a file to download?

Video Downloader For Mac Safari

Identifying the file in the Activity Window and Option-Clicking the file will start a download.

Cmd - S FFS!

Video Downloadhelper Safari

I always option-clicked in the activity window, but a lot of these other ones (including the original) are good hints for those like me who never knew about them. I can't believe I never realized some of these myself - particularly that you can just do Save/CMD-S when you have a difect link to an mp4 or whatever file!