On Saturday 28 July 2007 15:47:29 Bev Nicolson wrote:

I think I get it now (mostly) but do I save it on the desktop or open another tab in Firefox?

I wasn't very helpful on this thread.

...

followed by a space, then middle-click to enter the URL saved by "Copy link location". Thus I get a line like;

realplay http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news/world/ video/108000/bb/108931_16x9_bb.ram

I've just checked this URL. These .ram files are like little descriptor files for streamed media; they usually contain the URI of the stream itself. So I tried this:

$ wget http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news/world/video/108000/bb/108931_16x9_bb.r... $ cat 108931_16x9_bb.ram rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk/news/media_acl/mps/fix/news/world/video/108000/bb/108931_16x9_bb.rm?title="BBC (broadband) MPS clip"&author="BBC"&copyright="(C) British Broadcasting Corporation"

So I now have the URI of the streamed media:

rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk/news/media_acl/mps/fix/news/world/video/108000/bb/108931_16x9_bb.rm

which I passed to mplayer[1]:

$ mplayer rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk/news/media_acl/mps/fix/news/world/video/108000/bb/108931_16x9_bb.rm

and it played fine. Its quite possible that you'll need the w32codecs[2] package installed.

And what does the realplayer command in terminal do? It didn't seem to recognise it

It invokes RealPlayer[3]. You can install it instead of/as well as mplayer:

$ sudo apt-get install realplayer

Though not being an Ubuntu user myself I don't know which versions/repositories its in.

Cheers, Richard

[1] http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ [sudo apt-get install mplayer] [2] http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-79449.html [3] http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/net/realplayer

On 28-Jul-07 15:31:01, Richard Lewis wrote:

...

[...]

I wasn't very helpful on this thread.

...

...

followed by a space, then middle-click to enter the URL saved by "Copy link location". Thus I get a line like;

realplay http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news/world/ video/108000/bb/108931_16x9_bb.ram

I've just checked this URL. These .ram files are like little descriptor files for streamed media; they usually contain the URI of the stream itself. So I tried this:

$ wget http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news/world/video/108000/bb/108931_16x9_ bb.ram $ cat 108931_16x9_bb.ram rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk/news/media_acl/mps/fix/news/world/video/108000/b b/108931_16x9_bb.rm?title="BBC (broadband) MPS clip"&author="BBC"&copyright="(C) British Broadcasting Corporation"

So I now have the URI of the streamed media:

rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk/news/media_acl/mps/fix/news/world/video/108000/b b/108931_16x9_bb.rm

which I passed to mplayer[1]: [...]

Good point, Richard! Comments and firther developments below.

[1] 'wget' is one was to same the ".ram" file on you own system. Another is, when you right-click on the link in the BBC website, rather than selecting "Copy Link Location", select instead "Save Link As ..." You then get a dialogue in which you can choose where to save the ".ram" file. So do that, and save it.

[2] Once you have the .ram" file on your system, you can edit it, just as Richard did when he stripped of the "BBC" and "Copyright" stuff.

I'll use a short URL here for illustration. For instance, with the BBC URL

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/wato_wed

You will get a file "wato_wed", and you would see inside it:

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/wato/wato_wed.ra?BBC-UID=64e6dafb73 61237572f8c34e8111d6aa861ab8489010208e970f4340357899fc&SSO2-UID=

of which the stuff starting "BBC-UID..." is similar to the "Copyright" stuff that Richard cut out. So strip it down to:

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/wato/wato_wed.ra?

(which is the BBC's URL for last Wednesday's's "World At One" news program, which I "Listen Again"'d to). Then if you enter the command

realplay wato_wed

you would get you the full program (the whole half-hour of it). However, if there's just a chunk of it that you want, you can append a start and end to it:

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/wato/wato_wed.ra? start="00:23:19.5"&end="00:23:31.0"

[all one line -- no break] by adding a "?" immediately followed by

start="hh.mm.ss.s"

-- 2-digit hours, 2-digit minutes, 2-digit plus decimal point plus 1-digit seconds.

Then immediately followed by "&" and similarly

end="hh.mm.ss.s"

Once you have edited the "wato_wed" file as above, the command

realplay wato_wed

will precisely captures an 11.5-second clip (see below). If you omit the 'start' bit, it will play the programme from the beginning to the 'end' time. If you omit the 'end' bit, it will play from the 'start' time until the end of the programme.

[3] Why would one want to do this?

a) To listen again to precisely this clip (obviously!) On many occasions, I've emailed the edited internal contents to someone so that they can point their RealPlayer precisely at the clip in question.

Sometimes, I want to make a trancript of a segment of a broadcast to email to someone. It's handy to identify it in this way, so that you can re-play it precisely, more than once, with minimum hassle. Transcribing even 5 minutes can require a few replays to get it exactly right.

b) To capture the audio as a .wav or .au file on your system (however, I know no way of doing this for video).

For this you can use a program 'vsound': http://www.tucows.com/preview/8774?id=8774

which captures the bytes sent to your soundcard. The command

vsound realplay wato_wed

would do this. NB NB This activity may be legitimate for convenience in re-listening to the content "for private study and research", but may well be illegal if you do it for other purposes, such as making copies of the program on CD and distributing them.

============================

In the case of the above 11.5-second clip, I did listen to it more than once (but not by the above method of editing the file), since I wanted to verify exactly what had been said on the news bulletin when I first heard it on my car radio. What I thought I'd heard was:

"There have also been fears that Cambridgeshire would be the latest county to be badly hit by floods. Hundreds of homes along the river Ouse are in danger as high tides caused the river to burst its banks in the early hours."

If that had been true, it would have been pretty close to home, especially for some friends of mine, so I wanted to make sure. In fact it had been "cause", not "caused", so it was a potential risk and not (as I'd feared) a fait accompli. (In the event, there was no serious problem of flood along the Ouse).

Best wishes to all, Ted.

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