Last weekend, I blogged about the Yahooholigans downloadable video of Super Mario Brothers Supershow, a wonderful-terrible cartoon that featured pro wrestler Captain Lou Albano among others. Unfortunately, Yahoo/Yahooligans requires that you have Microsoft or Real's proprietary browser plug-ins to watch the video, and takes countermeasures to prevent you from downloading the video to disk where you can watch it with an open player like mPlayer.
Boing Boing reader Owen Williams has taken the time to create a recipe for downloading the video anyway:
How to extract movies from Yahooligans:
You will need:
* mPlayer
* mPlayer plug-in
* Windows Media codec pak (available on mPlayer webpage)Make sure these tools are installed and working.
1. Go to Yahooligans and select the cartoon you want to watch.
2. Let the video load in mplayerplug-in and start playing.
3. Right click and select "copy url"
4. Paste the url into an empty text document so you can edit it.
5. Edit the url and replace every "&" with "\&"
6. Execute the following command in the terminal of your choice:mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile [filename].wmv [url]
where [filename] is the filename you want, and [url] is the new, edited
urlMplayer should contact the server and start downloading the stream.
Don't worry about warning messages like "unknown object" or "Stream not
seekable!" When you're done it should report: "everything done. Thank
you for downloading a media file containing proprietary and patented
technology Core dumped ;)". You should be left with a playable, copyable, editable wmv file of the video you were watching.Sometimes mplayer quits and says "Core dumped ;)" but doesn't leave a
file behind. I don't know why this happens. I find I have to delete my
cookies or wait ten minutes and it will work again. I suspect Yahoo's
servers are coded not to spew videos too rapidly.
(Thanks, Owen!)
