How to Download a Camtasia Studio 2 Video

Downloading Camtasia videos from the web isn't as easy as it looks. That's because all the files that make up a Camtasia video aren't encoded in the web page as "regular" links.

Instead, depending on the version of Camtasia that produced the video in the first place, the names of the files are stored in different places in the HTML, XML and JS files that make up the video.

So if you do a File -> Save As in your browser, you won't get all the files you need.

This article describes how to extract the names of the files from a web page generated by Camtasia Studio 2.

As an example, have a look at this page:

http://CamVideoDownloader.com/video/TestCamtasiaStudio211/TestCamtasiaStudio211.html

Open the page in your browser, then select View -> Source.

In the <title> tag, you will see "Created by Camtasia Studio 2". Most pages created with this version of Camtasia have that as the title text, so that is the first thing to look out for.

If you look down the page, you will see this:

<EMBED src = "TestCamtasiaStudio211_controller.swf?csConfigFile=TestCamtasiaStudio211_config.xml"
  flashvars = "csConfigFile=TestCamtasiaStudio211_config.xml"
  quality = "high"
  bgcolor ="#FFFFFF"
  width = "1008"
  height = "593"
  type = "application/x-shockwave-flash"
  pluginspace = "http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
</EMBED>

Although there are no anchortext <A> tags there, most of the additional file names are contained in this section. So these are the files you need from this section:

TestCamtasiaStudio211_controller.swf
TestCamtasiaStudio211_config.xml

However, the actual video filename isn't even specified here. To get that, you have to look in the XML file, where you will see:

<MovieURL>TestCamtasiaStudio211.swf</MovieURL>

This is the name of the video file, the main file that you want. In this case, it is an SWF file.

One way of obtaining all these files is to use a file download manager, and download the following files one after the other:

http://CamVideoDownloader.com/video/TestCamtasiaStudio211/TestCamtasiaStudio211_controller.swf
http://CamVideoDownloader.com/video/TestCamtasiaStudio211/TestCamtasiaStudio211_config.xml
http://CamVideoDownloader.com/video/TestCamtasiaStudio211/TestCamtasiaStudio211.swf
http://CamVideoDownloader.com/video/TestCamtasiaStudio211/TestCamtasiaStudio211.html 

As long as you have downloaded all the files correctly, you should then be able to click on the HTML file on your own hard disk, and the video should start playing.

Does this sound like a lot of trouble? A much easier way to download Camtasia Studio 2 videos is to use Camtasia Video Downloader, which does all the work for you.

Article source: How to download a Camtasia Studio 2 video

About the Author

Lex Edmonds is a Camtasia expert and a software developer, and is the author of Camtasia Video Downloader, the easiest way to download Camtasia videos from the web, even from password-protected membership sites. His website is at http://CamVideoDownloader.com

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