I don’t watch TV anymore
May 26th, 2007
That’s a half lie. I actually do watch some TV…just not live. Most of my TV watching is recordings made by my SkipJam iMedia Center or downloaded content using my NETGEAR Digital Entertainer HD 8000. The rest of the of the time, I joost (yes its becoming a verb), youtube, or find streams on the web. Here’s one website http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/ that contains tons of episodes of my favorite shows. They even have several full length movies. I don’t know how they get away with posting these, but I hope they stick around at least enough time for me to grab all the files
The videos are all flash videos and with a little bit of a look around, can be easily download simply using wget. At the bottom of post, I have a small bash script that will download season 1-18 of the Simpsons. You can modify this fairly easily to accomodate other shows to download. It would be nice if they have an XML feed, then I can just stream the videos on my EVA8000.
Why am still paying for cable?
#!/bin/sh
wget -q -O - http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/simpsons.php | grep "watchtvsitcoms.com\/Simpsons\/S" |
while read line
do
echo $line | cut -c 59- | cut -c -49
done |
while read line
do
wget -q -O - $line | grep ".flv" | cut -d"=" -f 10 | cut -d"&" -f 1
done |
while read flvurl
do
echo downloading $flvurl
if wget -q $flvurl ; then
Categories: multimedia, raves, tutorials |
I figured out how to grab the movies as well. It uses an SWF container file. View the page’s code (for most browsers, just right-click and select view source). Look for the “file=” string. Most of the movies are broken down into a couple of segments. The segments are stored in an XML file designated by the file= setting. All you have to do is to open the XML file in the browser to show the URL of the FLV files. Once you have those, you can simply use WGET to download the files. You can automate this process as well. Maybe someday, I’ll put a script here.
Here’s an example of grabbing the Blades of Glory movie.
1. Find out the videos main webpage.
http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/Movies/Blades%20of%20Glory.php
2. Find the XML file..
wget -O - http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/Movies/Blades%20of%20Glory.php | grep “file=”
3. Open the file in your browser. Since the string after “=” is set to only the filename (no path), then the file must be in the same folder as the movie playback code. In this specific example it’s http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/Movies/. Appending the filename, we get the following URL:
http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/Movies/Blades%20of%20Glory.xml
Opening the file in the browser shows that the three FLV files
http://www.watchtvsitcoms-m-011.com/bladesofglory_0.flv
http://www.watchtvsitcoms-m-011.com/bladesofglory_1.flv
http://www.watchtvsitcoms-m-011.com/bladesofglory_2.flv
4. Use WGET to grab the three files.
You should have enough info to grab the other movies. Some movies contain only one segment. In this case, its a simple matter of grepping .”flv” from the movie playback page.
Do you happen to know how I can use this method for television episodes? When I go to http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/Dexter.php and/or http://www.watchtvsitcoms.com/Dexter/S03E02.php there is no sign of a reference to .xml or .flv files inside?
Those videos are using a server side flash player (SWF) to obfuscate the URL of the flash video. The URL you sent is actually embedding the videos from http://www.megavideo.com/. Megavideo uses http://www.megavideo.com/?v= to play the video. The v= indicates the video ID. Your best bet is to use a stream recorder to grab the videos. I found the following guide to help you get started:
http://all-streaming-media.com/faq/recording-media-stream/faq-record-download-capture-save-flash-flv-video-http.htm
Let me know what you find out.
BTW, your best bet is to use the Replay Media Catcher.