flash videos.

[Xavi Drudis Ferran]

> Sáb, 2006-08-26 às 11:39 +0200, Georg C. F. Greve escreveu:
>>  || On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:26:52 +0200
>>  || Patrick Ohnewein <patrick.ohnewein at lugbz.org> wrote:
>>
>>  po> I have seen that YouTube has an API[2] to be integrated into
>>  po> other applications. I don't know if You Tubes terms of use are
>>  po> adequate for the fellowship advocacy section. But at least it
>>  po> could be an inspiration.
>>
>> The last time I checked I found it impossible to simply view many of
>> the videos on YouTube with Free Software, so my evaluation of the site
>> stopped right there.
>>
>> Has this changed?
>
> ffmpeg seems to decode flash video!
>
> Someone wrote a small python program to download youtube videos:
>
> http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/
>

There are also some plugins for Firefox which automate this (I don't
remember the name, ask if interested), but they
only work for some web sites.

I don't fully understand it. But there seems to be some form of flash
video, in files with extension .flv which will play on vlc or mplayer
(yes, must be because of ffmpeg). But what you find on webpages is a .swf
file.
I guess somewhere in the .swf there's an URL for the .flv file, but I
don't know how to extract it, and apparently these scripts and plugins
simply
implement guesswork for the current URL layouts of some of the sites using
flash videos (youtube, etc.). For other sites you can't use it (unless you
find out the URL scheme - hard to do without any example -) and
modifiy the scripts or plugins.

And I don't know whether it is only .swf that is closed non standard and
.flv is some standard video format, or both are propietary and flv support
by free software is reverse engineering or otherwise hard work without
much guarantee to be maintainable because of the aribtrarieness of the
format...