Ok, so it starts off innocent enough, I caught a glance at this gif animation:

Colbert Rave

Is that Stephen Colbert at a rave? That is awesome!

So I’ll just watch the episode on the official website. :-)

wrong

GOD DAMN IT!

Ok, not a problem I’ll watch it on youtube

youtube.com (2012 edit: video has since been taken down)

…

Camcorder recording a television screen, that’s alright I guess, but I’d rather get the actual show itself.

  1. Can’t legally watch the show in any shape or form
  2. Head to bittorrent sites, found the show! :D
  3. 0 seeders :/
  4. Stumbling upon a random related website I notice the embed video works!
  5. I’ll just grab the URL of the stream and download it, too easy :)
  6. Spend an hour looking for an inbuilt header checker/stream finder for chrome + firefox
  7. Spend an hour or 2 looking for a stream finder for ubuntu
  8. Try 2-3 different programs, including get_flash_video and rtmpdump
  9. Wireshark! I’ll just use wireshark and grab the URL from the packets themselves!
  10. Ok. ok. I can’t see it. It’s an encrypted RTMP stream. O.O
  11. Notice all of the other programs are windows only
  12. Login to windows, proceed to download all 40 different stream/header/rtmp finders
  13. 2 of them actually work but refuse to download because Copy protected files can’t be legally downloaded? wtf?
  14. It’s now 3-4 hours after point 1, I DON’T EVEN CARE ANY MORE JUST GIVE ME THE DAMN FILE
  15. The alternative Replay Media Capture offers is Replay Video Capture, it’s pretty much just fraps. http://applian.com/replay-video-capture/
  16. Oh ma gawd it works
  17. The result of my 5 hours of effort:

click here

Thanks a lot Viacom/Comedy Central, serves me right for trying to watch your content.