Download streaming videos from Comedy Central's Motherload?

[teira87]

Does anyone know a way to download the streaming videos from Comedy Central's site? I tried with URL Snooper and SDP Downloader but they're all protected. Any suggestions?

[deleted]

I use the URL from Media Player. Or, just do a Video Screenshot.

[thesilvester]

If all else fails run it full screen and do a screen cap.

[deleted]

thats what i meant by video screenshot.

[thesilvester]

yeah I figured.

[teira87]

Is there a way to download from the source though? Screencapping loses quality.

[cooper]

Try to get the content to play with mplayer. If it plays, you can use the -dumpstream switch to save the contents to a file.

[deleted]

Or VLC

[digip]

Try to get the content to play with mplayer. If it plays, you can use the -dumpstream switch to save the contents to a file.

Isn't that only going to work for Linux and OSX?

What OS is he running?

Im using wmrecorder for getting at those pesky mms:// sites under windows but there are many you can find on google.

[jool]

If it's the same video player I get (you never know with media companies when you're not in the US) it's a flash player which streams flv video files. You can catch the url with a variety of programs but they may be protecting the file from direct download in various ways. However, you can catch the file while it is playing with something like Ethereal. It isn't a very user friendly way and someone may know a simpler way of catching files while they are streaming but it is certainly doable.

Edit: Just tried it and it worked but it really is a pain and not something you want to do with many videos.

[teira87]

If it's the same video player I get (you never know with media companies when you're not in the US) it's a flash player which streams flv video files. You can catch the url with a variety of programs but they may be protecting the file from direct download in various ways. However, you can catch the file while it is playing with something like Ethereal. It isn't a very user friendly way and someone may know a simpler way of catching files while they are streaming but it is certainly doable.

Edit: Just tried it and it worked but it really is a pain and not something you want to do with many videos.

I get a flash player too. Can you explain what you did with Ethereal? Sorry, I've tried several times and can't get a playable output. What format is it supposed to be in?

[jool]

Firstly make sure you start the capture before the video starts playing, the darker part of the scrub bar is an indication of the file being downloaded so you need to be capturing while that happens. In the prepare dialog you can uncheck the box for promiscuous mode since all the traffic you want is directed at you, set the filter to tcp as well to limit what you need to wade through. Also, stop any other transfers to limit what you capture. When thats done, start the capture.

Play the video you want and when the scrub bar in the player indicates that the file is downloaded (you don't have to wait for the whole video to play) stop the capture in Ethereal and scroll towards the end of the capture (just to make sure you don't get the ad).

You should have a lot of green lines (http traffic), many say "TCP segment of a reassembled PDU" in the info column and this is the stream that you want. Right-click on any one of them and select "Follow TCP Stream". This should (after some progress bars) show a new window with some http headers and the flv content (conveniently starting with the letters FLV). Make sure you click the "Raw" radio button and then click "Save As" and save the file somewhere.

Now you will need to open the file you saved with a hex editor (my preference is XVI32), what you want to do is to delete all the HTTP headers leaving only the flv file. In XVI32 you just find the first occurrence of FLV and put the cursor right in front of that and tell it to delete to cursor. The very first characters in the file should now be FLV. Then you save the file and if you did everything right it should play just fine in VLC.

That's how I did it, if there is a simple "Save the transfered files" menu option somewhere please let me know. :)

[teira87]

Thanks for your help! Of course right after trying that, I find a program that converts the urls directly to flvs -- it's called Replay A/V (torrent here), works with protected videos and is very user-friendly, so if you want a simpler way I'd recommend that.