Category: Technology Page 11 of 17

http://sdp.ppona.com/

This app makes it possible to save MMS (Microsoft) video streams into WMV files. So if there is some live web event in FoxNews or NBC5i, you can save it.

http://www.orbitdownloader.com/download.htm

This is a free app that allows you to sniff for pretty much any media file, even if they have caching turned off. As an example, I was able to download a 60 Minutes interview with Osteen and Horton from a flash video streaming server. Pretty awesome …

Update: 10.17.2007

http://www.orbitdownloader.com/download.htm

This is a free app that allows you to sniff for pretty much any media file, even if they have caching turned off. As an example, I was able to download a 60 Minutes interview with Osteen and Horton from a flash video streaming server. Pretty awesome …
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Figured this out today, not really difficult or all that complicated, but you do need some fundamental computer knowledge to be able to do this (Instructions for XP only):

1) Download and install Firefox (if you haven’t already, shame on you – www.getfirefox.com ).

2) Download and install a Flash Video player (I use Riva FLV Player – http://www.rivavx.com/index.php?id=422 ).

3) Using Firefox, browse to the website where the video resides.

4) If the video doesn’t auto-play, click the play button on the flash player in the browser. This will initiate the download of the FLV file into the Firefox cache. Also, you’ll want to wait for the whole file to download within the player before proceeding. Otherwise you’ll only get part of the video.

5) Browse to “C:Documents and Settings(Profile name)Local SettingsApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles(random numbers & letters).defaultCache”

6) Sort by date to show the most recent files in the Cache folder.

7) The FLV file will be a random letter/number named file with no file extension and should be the largest file at the top (or near the top of the list, may be second, third, or forth). It WILL NOT be the files starting with “_CACHE_”. FLV files are usually going to be several megabytes in size. If the video is short though, it could possibly be smaller than a meg.

8) Copy the file out of this folder, paste it to your desktop (or some other location), rename the file and put a .flv extension on the end of it.

9) Attempt to open the file with the FLV player. If it plays your video, you’ve successfully copied over the correct file. If not you’ll need to try one of the other large files at the top of the list in the Cache folder.

(Optional)

10) Sign up for a free account @ www.mediaconverter.org and convert your FLV file into any other major video file format (Max. 100 MB file)

– So far, I have been able to obtain Flash Videos from ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Youtube, Google, MySpace, MyFoxDFW, and several other sites. The only one I couldn’t get it to work on was NBC when trying to snag Heroes. They apparently have caching turned off on those files. So it’s possible that at the server level, if the site has caching turned off, this won’t work. You’ll have to go a different route to download the file … maybe using this … http://www.mediapirate.org/

Well, in this third installment of “Useful Protocol-Intelligent Javascript Code,” (not intending it to become a series, ha) I was sent a link by Matt Hinze where someone has already written some code that will do this exact thing, particularly for Google analytics js code. Take a look:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write( ‘<scr’+’ipt type=”text/javascript” src=”‘ );
if( document.location.toString().indexOf( ‘https://’ ) != -1 ) {
document.write( ‘https://ssl’ ); } else { document.write( ‘http://www’ ); }
document.write( ‘.google-analytics.com/urchin.js”></scr’+’ipt>’ );
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
_uacct = “UA-XXXXXXX-X”;
urchinTracker();
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write( ‘<scr’+’ipt type=”text/javascript”>’ );
if( document.referrer.toString().indexOf( ‘www.westerfunk.net’ ) ==-1 ) {
document.write( ‘urchinTracker(document.referrer);’ ); }
document.write( ‘</scr’+’ipt>’ );
</script>

I have set this up on Westerfunk.net and will see what the results look like tomorrow, to see if the code is actually rendering properly. So far it appears it is actually making the calls out to google on every page hit, but only G-analytics results will shed light on this theory.

Blog entry where the code came from:

(Original): http://www.reubenyau.com/google-analyti … rrer-only/
(Archived): http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/tech … er%20Only/

Update:
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This appears to be working very well and all my stats look back to normal on google-analytics. So this code is good …

Well after coming across some issues with the last version of code (i.e. when visiting the website, it wasn’t always rendering the google analytics javascript like it should have been, as reflected in the reports on google’s site). For the past two days, it only showed two hits. So I have now reverted back to my original if/else js code. I guess maybe it was getting cached or not finishing on some browsers or something. Strange …

Thanks to the help of a friend named Matt Hinze, this javascript code can be simplified. Here’s the code:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>

var url = window.location.protocol == ‘https:’ ? ‘https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js’ : ‘http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js’;
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”‘ + url + ‘” type=”text/javascript”>’);
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”/google.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);

</script>

This is really cool. I modified this to make it possible to differentiate HTTP/S protocols. If you are running a web site where you have both secure (HTTPS) and unsecured (HTTP) information, but want certain data to only show up on the secure pages, this will do it. On the clients’ machine, when downloading the html from the web server, this javascript will detect what protocol is being utilized (either regular HTTP or HTTPS) and render the code accordingly. I modified the code for my Google Analytics tags so that when using HTTPS it will utilize https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js for secure connections instead of http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js for the unsecured connections. I’ll show you my example code:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/JavaScript”>
if (window.location.protocol.indexOf(‘https:’)==0?’s’:”)
{
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”/google.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
}

else
{
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”/google.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
}
</script>