Misanthropic Geek Dot Net

VLC 1.1.x accepts youtube urls in its “Open Network Stream…” dialog.

It’ll opt for the highest resolution available, so if you want to force a less taxing quality, add this to your url.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yadda&fmt=5

This means you can save it to a file without a separate downloader tool/site. And/or you can watch at 2x speed or crank up the volume to 400% with the mouse wheel. Unless you save before watching, it’s subject to buffering, so seeking is best avoided.
 
 
It relies on an external script to scrape the page and fetch the video. That’s what needs fixing when youtube’s site changes.

VLC_Dir\App\vlc\lua\playlist\youtube.lua

Judging from the dir listing, several other sites are understood too.

I’m stringing commands together and want to see what’s passing through a particular point. Technically tee (Linux/UnixUtils) can do this. Its sole purpose is to duplicate stdout to a file, like a metaphorical “T” connector.

echo hello | tee somefile.txt | sed "s/e/a/"

 
Attentive readers will be thinking,
“The post just started; what’s wrong with it?” :P
 
*clickety-click*… Nothing, this works:

echo hello | tee /dev/stderr | sed "s/e/a/"

 
*drumroll*… on Linux, where everything’s a file.

While many MinGW ports on Windows internally translate the likes of “/dev/stderr”, the UnixUtils tee does not. A hyphen arg obediently makes a file named “-”. Linux guys can keep reading; this trick is nifty.
 
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According to the preferences, the three sections of Wireshark are:

• Packet List – Rows of src/dest/protocol/info
• Packet Details – Collapsible tree
• Packet Bytes – Tabbed hex dumps

Most of the time, if you’re sniffing text-based traffic, you’ll find interesting packets, right-click in the list, and “Follow TCP Stream”. The problem is Wireshark’s too honest sometimes, and if the traffic is compressed, you’ll see the binary garbage that’s really flowing through the NIC.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Encoding: gzip

If you see this HTTP header, there’s another approach.
 
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