[CelestialTeardrop]

So RealPlayer 11 allows video ripping from sites like youtube. But how safe are the .flv (flash) files that it downloads? Can they be infected or corrupted with malware/viruses?

And does anyone know if the flash videos are downloaded or recorded (I'm assuming that recording them would not copy any attached malware, is that right?)?


Any thoughts/comments are appreciated, thanks!

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All a YouTube .FLV file is is a video file that plays using Flash.
If you upload a video to YouTube, all it does when you play it is hide it behind a Flash window. When you log in you can see the raw .avi filename you originally uploaded. All a YouTube ripper does is download the same file that your browser downloads instead of just playing it off the website.

[Neil Jones]

All a YouTube .FLV file is is a video file that plays using Flash.
If you upload a video to YouTube, all it does when you play it is hide it behind a Flash window. When you log in you can see the raw .avi filename you originally uploaded. All a YouTube ripper does is download the same file that your browser downloads instead of just playing it off the website.

[starjax]

I haven't seen anything about youtube having infected files. whatever format you upload in, it will convert to flash video.

Now there are a lot of codecs out there that are malicious. Especially videos from myspace are known to have been infected with them.

Check out http://vitalsecurity.org/ for more info.

[CelestialTeardrop]

Thanks so much for your replies.

I was a bit concerned because I tried to download a video from the abc news site to watch later, and the download finished in about 2 seconds (which usually never happens for realplayer). The when I tried to play it from the realplayer library it opened Internet Explorer but did not load any website just a blank white page, followed by a realplayer message saying an error occured and the video can't be played.

I scanned the file before opening it with Norton and AVG-antispyware and it looked clean. Maybe the error is due to having to right-click the video then click on "download video to realplay" since there was no little "download" box when mousing over the video. Could it be that it was an incompatible format?