[MPlayer-users] Deconstructing how a .swf file gets a video

[Nathan Thern]

All-

I've been trying to grab several videos off the PBS web pages so I can
convert them to mpeg and watch them on my PDA while I'm commuting.
After lots of deconstructing, I have determined that all of the pages
load the same SWF file and pass it a link. The link refers to an html
page, and somehow the SWF file figures out the streaming address of
the video from that page.

For instance, the Sphinx video page
(http://video.pbs.org/video/1390312942/) embeds
http://www-tc.pbs.org/video/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf
and passes it "http://video.pbs.org/videoPlayerInfo/1390312942" as an argument.
PBSPlayer.swf (which is only 480k) does a quick re-direct to stream in
the right video. I have not been able to figure out the address of the
video from looking at the source of
http://video.pbs.org/videoPlayerInfo/1390312942

Is there some way to determine what PBSPlayer.swf is doing (e.g. what
streaming address it is accessing so I can dumpstream it with
mplayer)?

regards,
NT