Tuesday, December 30, 2008       ( 1:58 PM ) #permalink

Stop Skype starting on Mac login + kill caps lock + VLC screengrab shortcut

Apologies for not coming up with some more amusing anecdotes in my first post after Christmas, but I'm having a writers block. I do however have a rather lovely iPod touch (called Treacle), which I am experimenting with, and hope to give some feedback on in the near future. Any recommendations for apps, for video editors or just general geeks, would be appreciated in the comments.

So, some Mac tips that I've discovered with this abundance of free time.

Tiny thing this, but it's not in the Skype preferences, and if Mac has the equivalent of a preferences menu of apps to start at login, I haven't found it.

Ctrl+click the Skype icon in the dock and uncheck the "Open at login".

Kill the Mac caps lock key

It just gets in the way, does anyone ever need it? Again, there is no hidden trick for fixing this, it's in the preferences.

However, if you're a sloppy typist like me, this simple remedy will make life minutely more pleasing. Which is always a good thing. System preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Modifier keys and make Caps lock Key "No Action"

Screengrabs from VLC on a Windows machine

Came across this one when reminded that a plain PrntScrn (sp?) then opened in Photoshop, does that odd thing where the VLC window won't get saved to the clipboard. I don't really understand technically why that happens, but anyway.

In VLC Preferences -> General video settings -> Video snapshot directory (put something sensible in here so you can find your snapshots when captured. You can also change the type of files saved.

You can also pull stills transparently whilst watching the video using a shortcut. The default Windows shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+S. On Mac it's Alt+Cmd+s, which didn't work for me (why not? reserved for a system function?) until I changed it in the preferences. Do this by: Preferences -> Interface -> Hotkeys settings, Check the “Advanced options” box and scroll down to “Take video snapshot” and change it to any key you fancy.

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Sunday, March 09, 2008       ( 1:42 AM ) #permalink

How to download DRM-free video from BBC iPlayer

Updated 15th March: Below will no longer work for iPlayer downloads. :( With scripting - iPlayer behaviour can still be mimicked to get the goodies. Read the bottom of the comments for links to alternative methods.

Updated 9th March: Have corrected the bookmarklet which seemed to be getting cut short when you dragged it to your toolbar. Also tested with the Mac OS X and works for me using VLC as the player.

Yes it's true. The new version of iPlayer for the iPhone delivers mpeg4's without the "You have 4 more hours to watch this show", self-destructing DRM of the Windows Media version. They are 480x272 which is decent, and a 45 minute show comes in around 160MB.

You have to jump through a few hoops to download these, but once it's set up it's easy to download whenever you want, so bear with me.

  1. First you'll want to make your browser appear as if it's an iPhone. I'm working with Firefox, so sorry if this isn't your browser. Download one of the many handy Firefox plugins, The User Agent Switcher.
  2. After installation and browser restart, add a new User Agent and supply the following information (Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options)
    • Description: iPhone
    • User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
    • App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
    • App Version: Version/3.0
    • Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3
    The add user agent dialog box - image
  3. Now switch to having your browser masquerading as the iphone (Tools > User Agent Switcher -> iphone)
  4. Fire up an iPlayer page of choice.
  5. Find out the URL that links to the video by dragging this handy bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. iPlayerURL2
  6. Click the bookmarklet and the the URL you want should appear under the title of the video on the iPlayer page.
    Where to look for the URL - image
  7. Paste this into a new Firefox tab, the iPlayer site will respond and it will begin to download in your browser. This is a pain, so hit the stop button ("X" in a circle), and instead save the page (File > Save page as..)
  8. Bingo, your Downloads window should now pop open to show you the progress of the download, and the mpeg4 is yours forever to keep! You will want to download and play them in VLC which is by far the most accommodating of all the players, and is free.

Don't forget to reset your user agent back to default, otherwise you may find you're viewing iPhone mobile versions of web pages.

Also, not all the iPlayer content is yet available yet as the service was only launched Friday 7th March. I'm not sure if the BBC was meaning to release DRM free files, so this information may not be useful forever.

Thanks to PainInTheTech for the User Agent info, and Irregular Shed for his discovery of this iPlayer "feature".

Here's The Sky at Night playing in VLC on a Mac

Sky at Night playing on a Mac

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Tuesday, March 20, 2007       ( 1:57 PM ) #permalink

Pulling RTSP streams from a Windows box

For my own reference really.. I always forget.. this is IMO the quickest and easiest way. 1) Get mplayer (command line version) 2) Fire up the cmd.exe (I used to use a .bat that mimicked Linux commands but am trying Powershell which does the same thing, and more?) 3) Type. 

mplayer -dumpstream "url" -dumpfile filename

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