After the Mountain Lion install I'm trying to now go Flash free. Really, really 100% Flash free. This is fine for 99% of content out that I access, but sadly there are some videos that I still cannot get to without Flash.
I do know about the popular post by Gruber, however I'm not interested in installing Chrome because (1) I hate the heavy handed way Google forces itself into your system with its hidden daemons etc. and (2) you're still installing a Flash client on your system. I don't want a Flash client, period.
I see that such solutions do exist for iOS. To name a few:
But sadly no such options appear to exist on the Mac 🙁 In fact iSwifter was promised to the Mac earlier but there hasn't been a peep about this since.
What I'm looking for is some kind of web-based service either with a native Mac client app or simply a webapp that would:
- Allow me to render the entire site server-side in Flash and send me the video feed in some decent app or webapp (ala iSwifter), or
- Have some server side scraper of the swf file that finds the reference to the actual .mp4 and passes that along to you (ala Skyfire).
So far the closest thing I've found to this is ClipConverter, but sadly its supported list of services, though decent, is nowhere near extensive enough to cover all the obscure websites that I use which all roll their own crappy swf wrapper around the mp4/flv content.
Examples
Some people are suggesting client-side-only approaches like ClickToFlash. These are good but the problem is that any particular Flash based video service / wrapper needs to be explicitly supported by it so by definition cannot catch 100% of all content, only a dedicated server-based Flash renderer like iSwifter can do that. Here are some concrete example videos that require Flash which most solutions don't handle:
- http://www.destructoid.com/let-s-get-physical-with-quantum-conundrum-232175.phtml
- http://www.gamespot.com/deadlight-2012/videos/video-review-deadlight-6389587/
- http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6083-Inversion (this one has an HTML5 link but you need to pay to get in. That's plain wrong)
- http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi771138841/
Before answering, you can test your solution with the above links. Thanks!
Best Answer
I use ClickToPlugin, which converts some Flash videos to HTML5 (this has the added benefit of letting you download them by right-clicking and choosing
Download Video). It works for YouTube, at least, and for the videos on the second and third webpages you linked (though not the first).