How to Download Encrypted FLVs

mike — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:52:03 +0000

Ok. First: Don’t to this. Theoretical exercise. Technical experience. DRM stuff. People getting mad, etc etc etc.

HOW TO DO IT.
or really… how I did it because I’m sure there are a million easier ways. This method involves using terminal and looking at webpage source code, so if those things make you nervous… uuuhhh…. sorry.

1. Lets say you’re watching the Colbert report and you want to download the video thats there. For later, like to watch on the train. Route around in the source and find the asset which makes the video play. Probably has *.swf in there somewhere (but probably not at the end of the string)*. Copy that to your clipboard and then paste it in your location bar. Hit enter.
*If it DOES have something like .flv or .mp4 or .mov RIGHT AT THE END of a string - no ? or & or = or fancy stuff - you’re probably in luck. If it doesn’t download (or appear to save) right away when you put it into your location bar, then try giving wget in terminal a try. Just simply

wget http://thiswebsite/iwant/tostealavideofrom/thisvideo.mp4
2. So now you have a screen which is one big flash player. Hit play if you want, but again: view the source. There’s another tag in there, probably an object tag, and it has an src attribute. Copy the contents of that SRC attribute to your clipboard.
3. Google “url decoder” or use your favorite url decoder if you already have one. Paste that src tag into the decoder, decode it. Copy it, paste it into your location bar and hit enter. You get something that looks like an xml document
4. Now, if it hasn’t already (which it probably has) this is where things will begin to vary differently depending upon which service is provided the encrypted stream. Basically, use your brains and eyes to locate the link in this weird xml document that looks like its either linking to an array of resources, or one specific video resource. For Colbert, it looks something like this:

http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/data/[REDACTED]?uri=mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:270712
5. Copy this resource and put it into your location bar; hit enter. 1 of two things might happen: either 1.) you’ll be looking at a video for you to download or 2.) you’ll be looking at a string of resources. Those resources probably begin with the RTMPE or RTMP protocol. Copy the RTMPE protocol location of the video you want to view. Might look like:

rtmpe://[REDACTED]/ondemand/mtvnorigin/gsp.comedystor/com/colbert/season_06/episode_049/cr_06049_04_512×288_625.mp4
6. Download, install and use RTMPDUMP to copy this stream to a file: http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/
7. Beer o’clock

Objects without History

mike — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 06:12:19 +0000

Loveland

mike — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:43:27 +0000

I’m doing some work for an old and great pal, Jerry Pfaffendorf. His latest venture is a website where civilians are able to purchase square inches of land in Detroit for $1, and are able to do whatever they want with said land, with the obvious restriction that … well… it’s in Detroit. We’re hoping to solve a bunch of the proximity troubles through some internet hackatation and clevervility; we’ll see how it goes.

The end goal is a robust and sweet looking AR setup, but right now Jerry and some pals are just working on getting the camera going (an iPhone hooked up to a solar charged battery. The phone runs custom software which takes a photo and uploads it to flickr every couple minutes). Once thats up, I’ll be coding some simple image overlays so people can see how their inches measure up (har har!) IRL.

So, right now the recipe is something like flickr api, imagick, php and maybe some perl. Not to mention Lovelands own little URL based Api. Before long we’re talking some avidemux and ffmpeg, which I’m psyched about. More on this stuff when I’m not so pooped and there are slightly prettier images to look at.

Recently Penned Over-Wrought Potential Songtitles

mike — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:43:04 +0000

i hear myself in this
if not now, when?
if i can forgive myself one thing, let it be this
memories of things which have no history (or something along these lines)
it comes and then probably, yeah : it goes.

Just Some Notes

mike — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 07:18:30 +0000

photo by crunchcandy.

The First.

A man who is able to - and perhaps compulsively does - take notes of every occurrence within his immediate surroundings. That is to say, he able within the span of one minute to record the entirety of that minutes happenings restricted on to his current locus. Does this ability betray further special skills: Time travel? Extremely quick handwriting? Omniscience? Perhaps the man is not a normal man, but perhaps he is. Were he not a normal man, who would he be… God, perhaps? Were he a “normal” man, it’s rather unlikely you’d welcome such hurried scribblings as anything of import.

Not the Library of Babel, The Author of The Library of Babel.

A chorus which counts off the seconds, minutes and hours related to his note taking. A clock which keeps time / tempo. A clock like one of those old train time-table clocks, with the numbers made of slats which fall into one another. This is the sound which keeps the time. Sync’d to midi, probably. An ensemble, as well.

Does this man live on the train? Probably not.

The Second.

A band begins to play.
A video cassette is inserted into a VCR
Play is pushed
The very first images on the screen are perfectly in time with the music

The Third

5 sisters.
4 Porn Stars.

And an irrational fear of the mundane.

Tube Oscillator, Quadrafuzz, Amp, Max

mike — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:14:30 +0000

Been working on some stuff for Hilary which has involved much building and modding - bought a quadrafuzz kit from PAiA and then an old tube oscillator from an electronics chop shop a few neighborhoods over. Added some mods to it so its studio-friendly and finally got the whole thing plugged in and running today after some patching last night. These are the first sounds of the whole system.

Convolve Blur

mike — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:59:46 +0000

Working on a new piece for Brian and Madeline at the Chocolate Factory. At the tail of a night filled with shooting bandits and discussing the finer points of having to deal with a plague of hummingbirds, some videos got made testing a few ideas related to distorting video using sound. They follow directly.

More 7 Things Comments (and a book)

mike — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:19:03 +0000

Managed to get upwards of about 10,000 comments from the 7 Things comment feed in clean XML. Worked with Patrick for a little to get it all styled and looking somewhat pleasant in XML. There is this somewhat unpleasant PDF… but if you want to be one of the cool kids you should totally BUY THE EFFING LULU BOOK WE MADE.

How to Fade Up / Fade In using QLab

mike — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:49:09 +0000

I have had to do this like a million times in the last 2 years and if I put any considerable amount times between instances, I always completely forget. Fade ins in QLab are the most ass backwards designed, pain in the ass to remember feature in an otherwise elegantly and well designed program. It’s not hard - but for me, for some reason - its stupid-hard to remember.

So here’s a step by step set of instructions, just as much for me (cause I just figured it out after 20 minutes of grinding my teeeth) as for anyone else.

Create a Sound Cue
Create a Fade Cue after the Sound Cue
Drop the Sound Cue into the Fade Cue
Set the Sound Cue’s MASTER FADE LEVEL to -INF
Set the Fade Cue’s levels to where you would like the volume to fade up to
Make sure the fade is set to ABSOLUTE

I have been trying to leave ASCAP for almost two years now and they pretty much just WILL NOT LET ME.

mike — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:12:09 +0000