Shoaib Ali It's bloggin time

If you ever need to steal a streaming video then mplayer is the tool of choice.

I had to recently steal some streaming lecture videos from MIT for educational purposes off course. As lecturers at my university can't teach for shit.

Any way here is how you do it


mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile "File Name Here.rm" "URL Here"


In case of MIT lecture videos I had todo the following


wget http://mfile.akamai.com/7870/rm/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870/18/1...


Once' you've got the .rm file you have to open it up! The real deal is inside it.


more strang-1806-lec21-29oct1999-220k.rm
rtsp://a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net/ondemand/7/757/7870/v0001/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870/18/18.06/videolectures/strang-1806-lec21-29oct1
999-220k.rm
--stop--
pnm://a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net/ondemand/7/757/7870/v0001/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870/18/18.06/videolectures/strang-1806-lec21-29oct19
99-220k.rm

As you can see the URL is different for the stream. Now thats the url you are going to use to steal the stream like so


mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile "eigenvalues-eigenspaces.rm" "rtsp://a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net/ondemand/7/757/7870/v0001/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870/18/18.06/videolectures/strang-1806-lec21-29oct1999-220k.rm"
MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.0.1 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ (Family: 15, Model: 67, Stepping: 2)
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE SSE2
115 audio & 237 video codecs

Playing rtsp://a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net/ondemand/7/757/7870/v0001/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870/18/18.06/videolectures/strang-1806-lec21-29oct1999-220k.rm.
Resolving a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net for AF_INET6...
Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net
Resolving a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net for AF_INET...
Connecting to server a757.v7870e.c7870.g.vr.akamaistream.net[208.46.163.173]: 554...
Cache size set to 640 KBytes

Hope that helps someone, this is very useful because you can't always replay the stream unless you are on their campus. Now you have your own copy of the lecture you can play as many times as you like with any bandwidth or playing restrictions.