command line streaming URL scraping tool

[Brent Harding]

Oh, and the volume is almost nill on some of the local streams that use it. 
I know there's probably an inaccessible turn it up button, even replay AV in 
Windows can't seem to do it using winpcap. Maybe it's ssl too?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Geoff Shang" <geoff at QuiteLikely.com>
To: "Linux for blind general discussion" <blinux-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 06, 2010 1:16 PM
Subject: Re: command line streaming URL scraping tool


> Hi,
>
> Apologies if this has already been answered.
>
> On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Rudy Vener wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to locate a tool which when given a web page with a "Listen 
>> Live"
>> link, can return the actual URL of  an audio stream which can be handed
>> off to mplayer.
>
> If the "listen live" link actually points to a playlist file (.pls, .m3u, 
> .ram, .asx, .wax, .xspf etc), you can configure mplayer to just deal with 
> these by configuring the appropriate mime type to launch mplayer with 
> the -playlist option.
>
>> My problem as you will doubtless surmise, is finding the actual
>> URLs  of audio streams.
>>
>> Ideally I'd like a tool which I can use like this:
>> $ get_audio_url http://www.wabcradio.com > url.txt
>
> It would be pretty much impossible to write a tool to do this, and in fact 
> the site given above is a good example of exactly why it would be 
> impossible.
>
> On www.wabcradio.com, the "listen live" link on the front page actually 
> links to another page on the site, not to the stream directly.  The actual 
> listen link is on this second page.
>
> Furthermore, the actual listen link, when you get to it, actually opens 
> another page using some javascript.  The page it actually opens is 
> http://player.streamtheworld.com/_players/citadel/?sid=826&nid=2920
>
> This page uses more javascript to load up a flash-based stream player, and 
> even reading the source code does not clearly reveal the stream URL.
>
> It might be possible to find it by closely examining the code on this page 
> and reading some of the javascript files it includes, but I've not a mind 
> to do that right now.
>
> Given that finding this is hard enough for a human to do, and this kind of 
> obscurity is designed to stop humans from finding it, trying to write a 
> program to do it would be more work than just digging up the URLs from the 
> pages in question, assuming it can in fact be done at all.
>
> Geoff.
>
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