[ale] [OT] finding cable channel content via bittorrent

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 03/23/2010 11:14 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> I was on TruTV (Court TV) for about 10 minutes yesterday and I'd like to
> get a digital copy.
>
> I have it on my Comcast DVR, but getting it off is an unknown to me.

Unfortunately, the format of the drive is relatively opaque.  There is 
plain text information on what the drive's contents are available on the 
drive itself, but I've yet to actually figure out where the actual video 
content is or if there is a way to find out where it is; I suspect that 
it is scrambled as I couldn't find anything that looked like video 
headers anywhere on the drive.  :-(

> How would I go about finding yesterday's 9am - 12am show on the web.
> Then I'll need to edit down to my 10 minutes.

Unless it's available on their Web site, your only options would be to 
go hunting for BitTorrent search engines and search for those.  You'll 
be counting on the fact that someone actually cared enough about the 
content you're interested in to capture it and upload it somewhere, 
though, which (depending on the content) might be a bit of a stretch.

If you _can_ find the show on TruTV's Web site, then all you would need 
to do is find out if it uses one of the Flash players that saves to 
/tmp, or if not, run tcpdump while streaming the content.  You'd then be 
able to actually take the video feed and recompose it as a single file 
and get the interesting data out of that.  Such usage would fall under 
fair use as best as I can tell.  This would of course be a much more 
legal option than trying to find a ripped version of it on the Internet 
somewhere.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                    ☎ (404) 492-6475