Wouldn’t something like getting the actual video file (flv or h.264) be a simpler approach? I mean don’t you have to have some kind of sandboxing etc. since you are executing unknown code (swf)?
Oh, believe me, I'd love to. The difficulty, however, is that extracting H264 or FLV streams from embed codes is a process that every video host is actively attempting to thwart--and there's some 15,000 of them, and one of me. :)