Phooeyhoo Tutorial #2 — Capturing Hard Streaming Files

Okay, I just discovered a piece of software that's going to make this 10 times easier than I thought it was going to be.

Remember that last time we talked about grabbing easy-peasy streaming files. That is, those that pretty much give you their server and URLs which we then punch into Net Transport and go home happy. Well, what if you want to capture something harder? Suppose something that even plays in its own web video player so you never have the option of downloading its source .ram file or even inspecting the file to find out the URL. If you don't have the URL then you're out of luck. Well, this used to be pretty hard. The trick was to get a piece of packet sniffing software and then monitor the incoming packets into your computer. These packets would then need to be decoded to decipher the URL. Well, we don't need to do that anymore.

Indeed, to do it now all you need to do is grab the demo version of WM Recorder. Yep, you don't even need the full version because we're going to use the WM demo to grab our URL and Net Transport to grab the file. As in all good math texts, let's do an example! (WM will grab URLs of videos that play using WMV. On the same page you can find RM Recorder which is for Real Video/Audio files.)

Let's say you want to download the latest and greatest music video from Yah*** Musique. Right, you say. Why the hell would anybody want to do that when all that's on these days is crap? Okay, fine. Let's say we want to grab the classic Rilo Kiley video for The Frug. Going to Y Musique we do a search and voila — there it is. Okay, start by launching up WM Recorder and when the nag screen appears tell it that we just want to run it in demo mode. It'll tell you we're limited to 2 minutes of recording but we just want to grab the URL so that's just fine by us.

It should default in PRO mode but if not, just enable this option. This means that whenever it detects anything trying to stream something to your computer, it's going to grab the URL in that URL box. Well, you can guess what's next.

Clicking on my The Frug video, the Y Musique player pops up and starts loading. By the way, we need to use Internet Exploder for this because Firefox 1.5 doesn't like loading the Y and Formerly Ted Turner Musique Players.

Crap. An ad is playing you say. That's okay. The important thing to check is if WM Recorder correctly grabbed a URL. Let's look:

Nice. It did. But we'll ignore this one for now. (Unless you want to download the ad. If that's the case, grab the URL and download, baby!) Sometimes you have to wait for two or three ads, but that's okay. Like Hesse's Siddhartha we have the gift of patience. Ah, there we go.

Now, grab that URL. Once again, you must grab the whole darn thing. Then go into Net Transport like you did in Tutorial #1, paste in the URL and you will be rewarded.