Monday, August 21, 2006

HOWTO: Save Videos from Comedy Central’s Website

Updated: August 21, 2006 –

Using Samuel L. Jackson’s interview on the Daily Show as an example, the video page’s URL is:

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=73003

1. After opening its Page Source, Search for “theFileHolder”
2. Copy the URL behind “value=” ending with asx
3. Use URL Snooper to extract the actual mms link from asx URL
4. Paste the mms link into SDP and let the download begin

Here is the finished product of the video.


Original Posting: April 1, 2006 -

Comedy Central is a goldmine for funny video clips. The only problem is that all their videos in Windows Media format are very difficult to download. The only way to watch them is via Comedy Central’s website with embedded Microsoft Windows Media Player.

As of right now, Keepvid.com has not added Comedy Central to their database of downloadable videos.

With help of CoCSoft’s Stream Down and SDP Downloader, today I have discovered a way to save those hilarious clips off from Comedy Central's website with only few simple steps.

The following example is done in Firefox browser of Showbiz Show’s clip: Diesel Nauseum - Vin Diesel spreads his two sentences all over TV. (Windows media video 9.69 MB)

1. After the new window with embedded Windows Media Player pops up, click on “View All Videos from This Show”.



2. Right click on the link to desired video with right mouse button and choose “Open Link in New Window” or “Open Link in New Tab”.



3. In the new window or tab, Go to View, choose Page Source.

For Diesel Nauseum video, the URL is http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=60865

4. Scroll down all the text until the tag “embed id”. In the same tag, copy the URL between the quotation marks after “src=”, and it is a really long URL.

5. Paste the URL into CoCSoft’s Stream Down, and it will then download a file called videoswitcher.asx.

6. Open videoswitcher.asx in Windows Media Player, let it play until the actual video starts, right click on the video and choose Properties.



7. Under Location, copy the mms streaming URL into SDP Downloader and let it work its magic.

To covert video to other formats, try Sony's Vegas 6.x.
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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 2, 2006 at 8:08 AM

    Try this program instead. I have't tried it yet, but it looks promising...

    http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/urlsnooper/index.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. tianApril 2, 2006 at 12:22 PM

    Anonymous,

    Thanks for the tip about URL Snooper.

    It eliminates step 4 through 6 in my guide.

    SDP Downloader is still needed to download the actual video.

    ReplyDelete
  3. TokarJuly 18, 2006 at 11:28 PM

    An alternative to steps 5 to the end are as follows:

    Paste the embed id link into FlashGet. It will download a file with the same name as the EXPECTED file. In my case it was 2088_dollar.wmv (a video from Colbert report).

    It will also have the MMS:// link one desires.

    The difference is that FlashGet is 100% free :).


    Then after you get the link you can paste it into HiDownload and it will download the MMS stream. HiDownload isnt free, but it is updated...6.9 beta 4 was released only a month ago. SDP was last updated in 2002 :P.

    ReplyDelete
  4. SirajDecember 20, 2006 at 2:46 PM

    I second using HiDownload. When I downloaded a file using SDP Downloader and tried converting it to MP4 for my iPod, Videora just crashed. In HiDownload there was no problem what so ever.

    Here's the file I was trying to convert.

    http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=36364

    Thanks tian and tokar.

    ReplyDelete

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