Pooya Karimian

Blog Archives: Recording MMS Streams

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Recording MMS Streams

Finally this semester is finished, my second semester here in SFU. So till now I'm done with 4 courses and I still need to take one more course. I may write more about my research here soon. But for now some this is one of the things I have done during the projects and exams.
As you know lots of multimedia contents on the Internet are only streamable through different protocols such as RTSP or MMS. Unlike HTTP, MMS the Microsoft's protocol for streaming content is not easy to download. But one simple and useful utility I found recently is MiMMS. It can be used to download mms streams to a file. It can download both audio and video streams and wherever I tested it is working perfectly. It is good that it can be called from command line without depending on any other library so it is easy to use it when downloading large number of streams.
I was able to download music videos from Yahoo! Launch (recently changed name to Yahoo! Music) but I don't know whether it is legal to do so or not. I believe it is like recording from TV to VCR and as long as you don't distribute/sell that it should be legal. In Yahoo Terms of Service it is only mentioned that Resale of Service is illegal.
So this is my solution for recording some music videos from Yahoo. You need first to download mimms-0.0.9.tar.gz, compile it and put the binary in the same directory as the following script (which can be downloaded from: getlaunch.sh):

And for running that you need to find the video id of each video which you can find by checking the link address of that video or viewing the html source and finding the parameter to playVideo function call. Sample usage for Sting’s After the Rain has Fallen clip:

$ ./getlaunch.sh 2152289

This script is based on the note from Michael Clement and the script posted on Linuxforums.org.



Posted to Programming by pooya at April 16, 2005 11:07 AM
Comments

Posted by: Hamidi at April 16, 2005 02:54 PM

Great! What do you think about a cron to download all musics on it periodically?:)


Posted by: Pooya at April 16, 2005 06:07 PM

:) Easily possible I have couple of different scripts for different sites. You can even write a script to start recording a live station (say Radio/TV) at a certain time automatically. How about rebroadcasting? Maybe I can think of coding something for the next Iran soccer match.


Posted by: Saeedُ at April 19, 2005 09:01 AM

Salaam, thx for sharing your goodies Pooya :)


Posted by: Shri at October 13, 2005 09:20 AM

Hey Pooya, I am trying to write an app that can save streaming wmv files from the net to my disk.
I am a c++ and vb programer. Your source looks like PHP. Is your code available in c++. Thanks.
Shri


Posted by: Pooya at October 15, 2005 10:15 PM

Hi Shri, Actually the code I was referrering to is in C. But the script up there is a bash script. So go grab either mimms-0.9.tar.gz (refered above), mmsclient, or gmms. They all have the source code to save streaming wmv and at least the first two have a easy code to read and understand. Let me know if there's any other help I can do.




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