The CNN.com video experience is optimized for Windows Media Player 9 or above. No Windows Media Player detected.
This is the message which greets Linux users who attempt to view CNN news streams. I guess optimized for is officially euphemistic technobabble for restricted to.
What’s next? Restrooms “optimized for customers only?”
Luckily, we can out-nerd these dopes:
- Install the GreaseMonkey extension for Firefox
- Grab the CNN Video Link script over at Userscripts.org
- Head back to CNN.com, and exercise your newfound right to “Save Link As…” the .ASX file
- Extract the
mms: link from the plain-text .ASX file and feed it to MPlayer
- Enjoy!
Feel free to add the --dumpstream switch to archive the stream. Indeed, feel very free.
I was reading DVD Jon’s blog the other day and stumbled across some really great video of Cory Doctorow speaking in Norway.
Part 1 (267M)
Part 2 (203M)
Cornell University hosts some great discussion panels as a part of their University Computer Policy & Law program. Most of these are available as streaming video.
Thursday’s panel was entitled, “The Download Debate Strikes Back,” and featured an all-star cast of panelists:
- Alec French, Senior Counsel, Government Relations, NBC/Universal
- Cary Sherman, President, RIAA
- Avery Kotler, Senior Director, Business and Legal Affairs, Napster
- Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney, EFF
- Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Communications, NYU
- Fritz Attaway, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, MPAA
If you want to watch the video, point your crappy spyware-laden RealPlayer here.
Or for GNU/Linux dorks like me:
mplayer rtsp://specevents.video.cornell.edu/ucpl/Final41405.rm
The stream is almost 3 hours long, but it’s worth it. Truly entertaining and informative. By the way, Fred von Lohmann is a god. I think it’s time to donate to the EFF again.
Ever since MPlayer came around, video playback on Linux has been a dream. To put it simply, the thing can play freaking anything. MPEG, DVD…check. WMV, AVI, ASX…check. QuickTime? RealVideo? Believe it or not, check. It leverages avifile so it can actually use Windows codecs.
Oh, and if you can watch a streaming video with MPlayer, you can always save it. Just add --dumpstream to your command line.
Sometimes, it requires a teensy bit of manual labor to get things going. MPlayer doesn’t understand complex HTML pages with JavaScript and ActiveX controls (well, technically Linux doesn’t understand ActiveX controls, but that’s a feature).
For example, today I wanted to watch Herb Sutter’s OOPSLA ‘04 keynote on C++/CLI. Check it out here.
This is one of those annoying pages that tries to embed WMP in your browser window. Screw that. All one needs to do is find the actual link to the video. First, I wget’ed (wgot?) the url, using the --user-agent= switch to masquerade as Internet Explorer. Buried in the output was a link to the ASX file. After wget’ing that, I had a nice link to the WMV itself.
mplayer mms://foo.com/bar.wmv
It’s moments like this when I remember why I use Linux for fun and Windows to pay the mortgage.
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