Some sites try and force to you watch or listen stuff online. They don’t want you to save it and watch it at your leisure. To those RealPlayer-trusting fools I say: baws!
You want to read this article if (i) you’d like to rip any RealMedia stream or (ii) you like The Mighty Boosh, currently streaming over at BBC 3 or indeed (iii) you want to watch the Boosh while also feeling extremely self-satisfied that you beat The Man and his techno-tyranny.
What you will need
1. Get MPlayer. It’s not terribly legal and is likely to disappear soon. You need codecs and stuff. Good job I’ve set one up for you already.
2. The ability to use the command line, invoked by Start -> Run -> “cmd”. If you can do something like “cd c:\mystuff\mplayer” then you’re nearly there.
How to hack stuff
To hack a stream you must know its URL. These look like web addresses but the first bit (the ‘protocol’) is “rtsp:” instead of “http:”.
How to get the URL
1. Choose your victim (Boosh is a good start). If you see an option to use a “standalone player”, you are laughing. Note that the Boosh site provides exactly this.
1a. the “standalone” link will point to a .ram file. Don’t click on it, but instead right-click and save it to your computer. It will be tiny.
1b. open the .ram file in Notepad. Bingo! There are your URL(s) and Bob knew your mother intimately. Go to next section.
2. Alas without a standalone player you have to get technical. Here’s an example for hacking Zane Lowe from Radio 1.
2a. observe on the BBC site that the link for listening to Zane’s Monday show is http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/genres/rock_alt/aod.shtml?radio1/zane_mon
2b. we need to find which server is providing the stream. Time to get clever. Start listening using the web site as normal – this will link your computer to theirs.
2c. open up a command window and type ‘netstat -a’. Look for a line like:
TCP hal:1280 rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554 ESTABLISHED
This means that (i) my computer is called “hal” but more importantly (ii) theirs is called “rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554″.
2d. check the link from step 2a. We are going to put this together with the server above to build the URL.
2e. the magic URL is rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554/radio1/zane_mon.ra
Can we get the gear now?
OK! Chill. Use this command:
mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile pickafilename.rm -dumpstream the_URL
So for Boosh episode 4 (only just out):
mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile boosh4.rm -dumpstream rtsp://rmgeo.bbc.net.uk/bbcthree/mightyboosh/bb/boosh_s02_ep04_16x9_bb.rm
Is this cool? You are absolutely focknig right it is, and are most welcome.
12-Aug-05 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
Baws to that.
12-Aug-05 at 10:16 pm | Permalink
I’m inclined to agree with CJ. But then, I’m drunk oot of my sodden girlparts. And I cannae work computers.
14-Aug-05 at 7:53 pm | Permalink
…and as Realplayer is wretched, shun it in favour it the Real Alternative.
03-Sep-05 at 1:25 am | Permalink
However, if running Linux and using the GTK based Real Player, it’s really rather good, and you have the advantage of apt-get install mplayer-$arch where $arch is 386, 686, k6, etc, depending on your processor, and apt-get install w32codecs in order to get yerself a copy of mplayer and the realmedia decoder. once dumped, i supose you could even use mencoder to transcode to a standard mpeg format and free yourself from proprietry codecs.
Shame to find that i’m not the first to come up with such an idea though.
08-Sep-05 at 3:40 pm | Permalink
Very good. The bbc have now taken the web links offline, but you still appear able to download. Nice!
10-Sep-05 at 2:38 pm | Permalink
Just ripped the Elbow session from BBC 6 Music. URL is
rtsp://rmclip2.thdo.bbc.co.uk:554/6music/6m_gideon_wed.ra
Will only work for a week though I imagine.
11-Sep-05 at 7:29 pm | Permalink
…and the tunes start at 1:40:00 – fantastic.