Streaming video capture problem

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Tuesday 28 July 2009 09:24:51 Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 July 2009 01:56:37 suvayu ali wrote:
> > 2009/7/27 David Boles <dgboles at comcast.net>:
> > >>>> On Monday 27 July 2009 16:32:32 David Boles wrote:
> > >>>>> I have a friend that perched herself on a plinth in Trafalgar
> > >>>>> Square as part of a 'live sculpture' project.
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>> The streaming video is Flash. And the videos are archived can be
> > >>>>> viewed later.
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>> She want to show this to her mother but her mother has no computer
> > >>>>> to view it with. Nothing that I have tried will capture the video.
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>> Video located here: 
> > >>>>> http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Margot
> >
> > <.....>
> >
> > > None of those are actual URLs to the video. Of all of these the largest
> > > was 160k. I doubt that a full hour of audio and video would be that
> > > small.  ;-)
> >
> > I think you are misjudging the situation. The stream seems to be a
> > live stream. If that is the case, then there is _no_ file. The only
> > way to grab something like that would be with a script using mplayer
> > or vlc. I don't know how to do that, but that seems to be the only
> > possible solution. I think someone posted an mplayer script to do
> > something like this a few months back, but in that case it was _not_ a
> > flash stream. Maybe the archives will help you here.
>
> That's ringing bells.  Before people started writing plugins to capture
> youtube video I remember that someone wrote about identifying the temporary
> file that is created, and saving that.  Unfortunately I can't remember the
> details, so I hope this will remind someone with a better memory.

That's the easiest trick in the book --- when you click to play a YouTube 
video, the browser downloads the data in /tmp directory with a name of the 
type Flash<something> (eg. FlashSjfdEf or such). You simply watch the download 
progress indicator below the picture, and once it is completed, pause the 
movie, go to /tmp directory and "cp Flash* ~" to get it in your home 
directory. Later on you can play it in mplayer or so.

This technique is very easy and Just Works, I use it on a daily basis.

Of course, you might happen to have more than one Flash* file in /tmp, but I 
typically copy them all, and later on examine which one I need.

Not sure if this will work for the OP, though.

HTH, :-)
Marko