[dundee] vsound?

[James Le Cuirot]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:31:10 +0200
"Dan Bolser" <dan.bolser at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's the rub... Ive been given links to all kinds of crappy
> streaming formats from a conference I recently attended. Seems that
> they are not subscribing to the idea that 'information wants to be
> free' - to that end I am trying to give it a helping hand by capping
> the vids.
> 
> A selection of the type of thing I want can be found here:
> 
> http://leadingstrand.cshl.edu
> 
> 
> (click 'Open Access' - those crazy hippies!)
> 
> The actual content that I want to cap has the extra 'joy' of requiring
> authentication and a lovely 25 hour limit on view time (thats really
> good considering there are 50 hours of lectures).
> 
> Sadly xvidcap isn't capping sound on my system... running vsound was a
> way to grab sound, but also an exploration for something similar for
> video ... (I don't like the way xvidcap prevents me using the box for
> anything else).

xvidcap is an even worse idea! You need the right tools for the job.
For the open access videos, this is a one-liner. (-; For the first
video...

mplayer -playlist http://leadingstrand.cshl.edu/FAM/indexram/DarwinianChristian.ram -dumpstream -dumpfile DarwinianChristian.rm

Wait patiently for the video to finish and you'll have a perfectly
normal RealVideo file at the end of it that you can play and transcode
to your heart's content. It's a real-time stream so you can't grab it
any faster than real-time.

For the restricted videos, do exactly the same thing but add the -user
and -passwd options with the relevant details. That should do the trick.

James