aka video recording means keeping a local copy of a video you can view online on the
Internet. Often you need to download a video, either to keep a copy in case the original is withdrawn, or to
transcribe it. Sometimes all you have to do is click a download button. Usually those
hosting the videos don’t want you to do that. They are worried you will pirate the video, put it on your
own website, and get the associated advertising revenue instead of them, or look at it yourself over and over
without having to wade through the ads on the front. People hosting the videos go out of their way to make it
difficult for you to keep a copy.
How To Download
Use the free trial versions to give various hacking tools a crack at downloading your video. They will have the
best chance of success on the famous hosting sites such as YouTube. There is no guarantee they will work in any
given situation. It is an escalating war game between hosters trying to stop you from downloading and the
crackers attempting to defeat their defences. Most tools with only one with one or two formats of video stream.
To confuse you, hosters often lie about the type of stream they are feeding, for example they will claim it is
Flash when it is really Microsoft or claim it is Real Audio when it is really Quicktime. Browsers automatically
see through the lie by paying attention to the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail) type the server sends.
Possible Video Formats
| Video Links Legend |
|---|
| streaming or downloadable |
|---|
| Click corresponding icon to download player. |
|---|
| Apple QuickTime |
 |
| BitTorrent |
 |
| DivX |
 |
| DVD |
 |
| Flash animations |
 |
| IBM/Lotus Freelance presentation |
 |
| Google |
 |
| Microsoft Media Player |
 |
| Microsoft Power Point |
 |
| mpg |
 |
| mp3 |
 |
| mp4 |
 |
| Real Player |
 |
| Shockwave |
 |
| VHS tape |
 |
| You Tube |
 |
| unknown |
 |
| lyrics |
 |
| transcript |
 |
Manual Cracking Steps
If none of the commercial cracking tools you try work, you can attempt some simple manual cracking on your own.
It is not that difficult, but it is not something for a novice. This essay is by no means a fool-proof recipe,
just some general hints on how to proceed. Your steps are:
- Find the true name of the actual video file you want to download.
- Convince the server you are an ordinary browser desiring to play the file online, and download that file,
usually in some special streaming protocol, not HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) e.g. using NetTransport
- Convert that file into the format you prefer, e.g. MP3, e.g with GoldWave.
- Feed that local copy into a player for viewing, e.g. with VideoLAN.
Browser View Source
View source the web page where the video image appears. Look for URL (Uniform Resource Locator)s
that end in .swf
or other video extensions. Try playing them directly. Your might be able to download such a file you find
with :
java com.mindprod.filetransfer.Download -jar filetransfer.jar
"http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/watch_v8-vfl49669.swf" whatever.swf
download is part of the FileTransfer
package
Wireshark
Run Wireshark with capture filter tcp port 80 and display
filter of http.request.method == "GET". Then let it watch you start up the
video in your browser. Once it has started playing, stop the Wireshark capture. This will give you a list of all
the web pages and files your browser downloaded. Some of them will be the videos you want. Right click a
candidate to see the details of the download request. Then use the download utility,
part of the FileTransfer package to download them.
You may end up downloading a lot of frogs before you find your prince. Check the Mime
entry to find the likely file name extensions for the sort of file you are looking for.
Russian Dolls
You may see .asf files being downloaded. These are Microsoft playlists. They contain
XML (extensible Markup Language). Download them and look inside to find the URLs
of the actual video files. They will contain URLs
of the form
mms://video.cpac.ca/cpac/20/AR_CPAC3E6480.asf. Unfortunately, the server likely
won’t let you download them with ordinary browser HTTP protocol. You will need some special program, such
as, NetTransport, to speak the mms: protocol to the server to download instead of play. NetTransport can speak:
- HTTP/HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over SSL (Secure Socket Layer))
- FTP/ through SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)/SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) (SSH (Secure Shell) File Transfer Protocol)
- MMS (Microsoft Media Server) (Microsoft Media Services)
- RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) (Real-Time Streaming Protocol)
- PNM (RealNetworks Protocol) (rename PNM to RTSP)
- BitTorrent
- eMule
- RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) (Real Time Messaging Protocol)
Loopback Audio Recording
 |
| loopback mini audio stero plug |
Conceptually you could capture the audio-only from a video, by playing the video in your browser and tape
recording what comes out the loudspeakers. Then you could play that back into the microphone to some sound
capture software like GoldWave.
You could do that more elegantly with a patchcord that loops the output of your sound card back into the input
port. Then you don’t need a tape recorder. You record live.
You can do that even more elegantly (and with less static) by electronically looping the internal digital
output of your sound card back into the input using a software utility.
punctuation 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (all)
©1996-2012 2008-08-07 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
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