I have had a lot of issues with flash videos in the past. I have had some difficulties with it crashing in firefox, and I have had issues with full screen support. There are services that let you download and then play the flash video in an external player, but normally I just want to immediately watch it, but be able to watch it in an external player.
There is an easy solution to this. Just load the video in firefox, and then hit pause once it starts playing. Then, open up the terminal, and run the following command:
smplayer /tmp/Flash*
or
vlc /tmp/Flash*
This probably also works for many other video players using similar commands. I have had success with youtube, and vimeo when using this, but I would assume that it also works with many other video services. This will not work with encrypted flash videos though.
