nalioth 405 Posted June 17, 2009 Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 Howdy folks. The SRBs - Saiga-12.com thread got me to thinking about y'all . . . What if you want to save the video on your hard drive? The wmv file linked in that thread is 204 bytes (barely enough for the header information in some media files). What's up with that? Well, when we download the 125_SRB.wmv and open it with a text editor, this is what we have: <ASX VERSION="3.0"> <ENTRY> <REF HREF="mms://a1286.v18566b.c18566.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1286/18566/v000 1/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com/18355/wm.nasa-global/STS-125/125_SRB.wmv" /> </ENTRY> </ASX> Whoa. It's some sort of xml file. Most of it is cruft relating to the xml standard, but what's that funny link in the middle? What's a mms:// link, anyway? mms:// is a microsoft protocol. It stands for "microsoft multimedia server" or "microsoft multimedia stream" or something (microsoft sucks, so who really cares. . . ). The mms://a1286.v18566b.c18566.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1286/18566/v0001/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com/18355/wm.nasa-global/STS-125/125_SRB.wmv link in the original wmv file tells your media player where to go get the file (the video file is actually 160 megabytes) Well, that's neat. How do we download the bloated thing? The open source community brings us mimms. mimms is an mms (e.g. mms://) stream downloader mimms is available via the package mangler in all linux distros, and via MacPorts for OSX (or can easily be compiled manually). Windows users will need Cygwin to compile it. Those of you who don't like the command line, there is a graphical frontend for mimms called Gmimms. Gmimms will need manual compilation, I'm afraid. This technique also works for .asx files. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
sacsucks 3 Posted June 17, 2009 Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 This is an easy to use free program to pull videos off a website without decoding the source code. http://www.downloadhelper.net/ Quote Link to post Share on other sites
loki0629 55 Posted June 17, 2009 Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 Doesn't microsuck's media player have a save feature? Or does the save feature only save the .xml-format .wmv file? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
janusthephoenix 24 Posted June 17, 2009 Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 I'll second DownloadHelper. It works for just about anything. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
nalioth 405 Posted June 17, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 Doesn't microsuck's media player have a save feature? Or does the save feature only save the .xml-format .wmv file? I have no idea. I've not run windows in 9 years. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
loki0629 55 Posted June 17, 2009 Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 Doesn't microsuck's media player have a save feature? Or does the save feature only save the .xml-format .wmv file? I have no idea. I've not run windows in 9 years. I only use windows at work and media player is verboten. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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