BLOB Video
The web browser recognizes Blobs as byte streams. BLOB or Binary Large Object is historically database related. Here it is used to serve video in a way that the web browser generates a BLOB URL internally, not the remote host. The BLOB URL, or more correctly the Object-URL will create a special reference to a remote video file used locally in the single instance of the browser and in the same session. It is essentially a way of serving the client browser a file from a database source that is binary, rather than text, and requested in a way that the browser creates the object.
For the average person they will find that if they are viewing a video file embedded in a web page that happens to be a BLOB style URL, they will be unable to save the video for later offline viewing. Often humorous video shorts are served as BLOB video to the browser and thus the user that wishes to save a humorous video for later offline viewing will find the "save video as" option disabled in the web browser.
Example of a BLOB video URL embedded in a web page:
blob:https://null.robotz.com/asdfghjk-0000-0000-00db-373bd8f02aa8
save as hack
This procedure works in Firefox, and theoretically will work in Chrome.
- open the page with the blob video
- press F12 for the developer console of the web browser
- click the NETWORK tab on the developer console
- refresh the web page (F5)
- click on the TRANSFERRED column twice to sort by file size until the largest is listed at the top
- look for the desired video under the FILE column, right click and choose "open in new tab"
- in the new tab the video will start playing, you will be able to right click and choose "save video as"
The largest file transferred while loading the page is probably your video. It will likely have mp4 or avi otherwise recognizable video extension.
references
- stackoverflow.com: How do we download a blob url video
