How to record streaming video to your Mac …

Caption: This video walks you through the steps described below — it’s mostly silent until the audio output is restored to the speaker for testing/playback …

One of my perennially popular blog posts is a movie review — Symbolism in “The Ninth Gate”  with over 100K views to date — which could benefit from a few video clips lifted from the movie. I recently wanted to record a few clips from a movie streaming on Netflix for another review — only to find that Mac’s QuickTime Player and Safari conspire to prevent me from screen recording. So I futzed around until I got it to work. Today a friend asked how it could be done, so having to write it up for her, I thought to share the process in this post …

How to download video in Safari 5 …

After upgrading to Apple Mac’s Safari 5 browser I found that I could no longer double-click to download video files in the Activity window as I was able to do in earlier versions of the browser. It’s an option+double click now.

Adding the AppleScript Script Menu to the Menu Bar …

To add the AppleScript Script Menu to your Mac’s Menu Bar navigate into /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras and double-click on the Script Menu.menu file. Then use this menu to locate and run application specific scripts.

Safari hangs on launch: What to do about it?

If you feel compelled to force quit Safari because it has apparent stopped responding — and then find that it hangs on re-launch — you may try this first: Have a little patience!

It may be busy, not hung. Launch your Activity Monitor application, select Safari and then click on the Sample Process button. A window opens and takes a sample of the app’s activity for a few seconds and presents the results. If it’s doing something, give it a few more minutes. Go make a cup of tea. By the time you get back it may have finished what it needed to do — cleaning up some big mess. Safari eventually launches, or it did in my case.

Of course if the Activity Monitor doesn’t show Safari busy doing something then giving it more time to do nothing isn’t helpful. I followed a lot of web advice, to no avail, such as …
Go>Go to folder… finding /var/folders/ and opening up all the private caches to find the folder com.apple.Safari and deleting its contents or deleting files from Users/~/Library/Safari etc.
… perhaps one of these may do it for you.

For the record: I’m on an Intel MacBook, under Mac OS X 10.6.2 using Safari 4.0.4.