If you want to save and watch many web-based movies and Flash files directly to your Mac for later offline viewing try this neat reader provided tip out. Sent in by Robert Warner, he writes this handy trick to download just about any videos directly to your Mac using only Safari and the little-used Activity Monitor feature of the app, without installing any additional software.

This should works to download any web video so long as it gets loaded into the Safari browser or cache, but you should be certain to only use this on video content that specifically allows for sharing and for such downloading for offline usage – not all movie and video content on the web has that license and it’s important for you to determine that on your own.

OK without further adieu, here are the steps he Robert provided us to download and save web video or flash files to Mac OS X:

Launch an independent Safari window with the video you want to download

Press Command+Option+A , or go to Windows > Activity to bring up the ‘Activity Monitor’ window in Safari

, or go to Windows > Activity to bring up the ‘Activity Monitor’ window in Safari Look through the activity for “Video Name”, look for the largest file size and double click to download it

Find the file that you downloaded (usually named get_video or videoplayback.flv) in the Finder and edit the name so that it has a .flv file extension

Confirm the file extension change, and now you can watch the downloaded movie in VLC or Perian equipped QuickTime

Robert also tells us that this should work in the Windows version of Safari but I can’t confirm that. Thanks for the tip Robert!

If you want to download songs tracks from video there’s an easy way to do just that too, using an app that extracts the audio track from the video file in question.