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From: VanguardLH on 13 Mar 2010 22:35 Bear Bottoms wrote: > VanguardLH <V(a)nguard.LH> wrote in news:hnheg1$8m1$1(a)news.albasani.net: > >> Your response reminds me of when I reported a defect in behavior of a >> program being alpha tested. The programmers response was that it >> works okay on his host. So I told him to shut down his host and drop >> it off at Shipping to send to the customer. It is irrelevant that it >> works on his host when someone is reporting that it is not working on >> their host. > > Your response reminds me of someone having an issue, and jumping to the gun > that everyone will have that same issue except for maybe a few and it could > have nothing at all to do with your own setup. Your setup has an issue. > > Your link to Star Trek VII generations is downloading and playing fine. I > simply searched Hulu for it, played the movie, it immediately showed up in > the file pane and I started downloading it. While it is downloading, I am > playing it in VLC as we speak. > > Title: Hulu-Star Trek VII Generations-watch the full feature film now. > > URL: rtmpe://98.174.30.118:1935/ondemand?_fcs_vhost=cp47346..... > > Duration: 1:57:54.024 640x360 > > This program is by far the best I've used for this type of download. I > highly recommend it. I never claimed that EVERYONE would encounter the same failure as I experienced. I said that I tested the product that you were touting and discovered a failure. I was willing to test your success cases but that would not have proved if the other video would fail. I was looking for cases of failure, not success, to determine how useful was the product. A theory is just that until just one instance disproves it. Thousands of complying cases to prove the theory true do not outweigh just one instance that makes the theory fail. Until you actually decided to test the claimed failure, it was unknown if the product worked correctly (in your own testing environment) despite all your claimed successes. I'm pretty sure you're old enough to understand how disproval works. Also, just because the test works for you doesn't mean it will work for everyone else. Just as my host can be different that causes the failure, you could have a platform that allows a success that will not be experienced by ALL other users. That mine is "broke" doesn't mean yours is "good". Thanks for doing the test in your working setup on the claimed failure. I will now have to change my testing environment from a VM to the real OS (but I'll probably use ReturNil to ensure that I can wipe any changes by this product should I decide not to keep it). With my firewall, I will also be monitoring to just where this product connects. If I see it going anywhere than the stream source(s), I'll be choking that off since I'm not interested in provide data or stats without being informed about it and what it contains. Thanks again for testing. After another test, I'll probably go visit the forums to get a feel for stability, usability, and trustworthiness of this product.
From: VanguardLH on 14 Mar 2010 01:01 Well, I did a test outside the VM and on my real host. Up front I will say, boy, am I r-e-a-l-l-y glad that I used Returnil so I could discard all changes to my host made by this software. After installing the program and loading it, I saw the following events: - On startup, this program wanted to connect to huludownload.com. That isn't Hulu. That's another site for a video downloader. Why does this capture program need to go to another capture program's site? It probably doesn't but is instead going to a parent or associate site. If you visit that site in a web brower, it's layout looks remarkably like the streamtransport.com site. They look similar in layout. Both these domains hide behind GoDaddy's private registration service. I suspect they're owned and operated by the same entity. - Look in the install folder for StreamTransport. Those files total a size of under 7MB. That's pretty small, especially considering that this program also includes RTMPE support to capture encrypted video streams. Huludownload.com is an *online* service for capturing content from Hulu. What might really happen is that this "viewer" program connects with the site from where you want to capture a video but directs the stream's source URL through the online service to do the capture and then sends the captured stream to this viewer app. The "capture" may actually be done online and then relayed to you via their local client. I'd have to do more analysis to find out from just where the client connects when it "captures" the stream - but I can't because of a later reported problem where I cannot start the actual capture of the stream. I can see this client detects where are the stream sources. I couldn't test from where it actually gets the net traffic when doing the capture (download) operation. - On the program's startup and if I block its access to huludownload.com, the following error message appears: The testing program was expired by "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd", please download the full version for further use. Huh? Since when did W3.org ever get involved in "expiring" a site? If I don't block access of the program to it phoning home to this other site, it manages to paint its middle pane (embedded web browser) with the home page (www.streamtransport.com) and there is no such error. - The program then wants to connect to www.streamtransport.com. That is, it wants to phone home to a site that you know about. If you block that access, the middle panel inside the program's UI will NOT populate. The middle panel is an embedded web browser which will show their home page (when it starts) or the web page of where you want to capture videos.. This in itself isn't omnious. - While the install of the program inside a VM gave me the Download, Delete, and Clear buttons (so I could, for example, select a stream and click Download to actually capture it), those buttons were missing in my real host. The major difference between the VM and my real host is that the VM has IE7 installed in Windows XP Pro SP-3 while my real host is the same OS but has IE8 installed. I don't know what IE version that Bear Bottoms was using but it appears this program may not function correctly with IE8. Another possibility is that I upped the screen DPI by 125% (from 96 DPI default to 120 DPI) so I don't get headaches reading the text on the monitor. Enlarging the program's window to fullscreen did not show the buttons (so they may be hardcoded to show within some fixed number of pixels from the right edge of the window but the logical edge is too far out from the right side of the physical window. Basically this means that I can see the list of streams that the program finds but I cannot download any of them. The author obviously decided not to spend any time on a right-click context menu to let me choose Download, Delete, and Clear from there. So I could never test the actual capture operation of the program under my real OS. The test under the real OS had more problems then under the VM. - Why does the program need to phone home when the middle pane (the embedded web browser) is NOT connected to their web site? During video play and while the program is capturing the source of the streams, it connects back to eigbox.net (which, remember, is where a traceroute to www.streamtransport.com ends up) on port 5140. Why do they need to be monitoring what you are downloading and capturing? I might have continued the trial except that the Download, Delete, and Clear buttons were not available in the UI for the program. Without the Download button (to actually have the program connect to the stream source to download and capture it), and with no right-click context menu that gave me the Download function, there wasn't much more I could test with this program. Disabling the anti-virus and firewall programs did not alter (improve) behavior of the StreamTransport program or give me access to the buttons required to use this program. Sorry, but I'm not reverting from IE8 to IE7 or lowering the DPI to squint at the screen *if* those were the cause of the mispainting of this program's UI. It looks like a doable program (provided nothing malicous or unwanted is occuring with the phone-home connection when you are capturing videos) but it won't be something that I can use. It does seem to overcome the restriction of rights control when using the RTMPE Flash streaming protocol with encryption; however, both Applian with their Replay Media Catcher and Jaksta were forced to remove support for RTMPE with lawsuits filed against them (don't remember if it was Adobe or the content providers that didn't like their streams captured). Since the sites for this product appear to be in the US, and regardless of where are their owners, it seems what fucked over RMC and Jaksta could be employed against StreamTransport. Good now, might not survive. Maybe I'll try again later if they manage to change the layout of the UI so I can actually get at the buttons that have disappeared off the right side of the list pane at the bottom. If someone else wants to trace from just where this client receives its streaming data (from the identified stream source or from huludownload.com or one of their "online capture service" servers) then we could qualify whether there would be a privacy issue as to what you might be capturing. I don't think there is content at Hulu that anyone would be embarassed about but does this program only work with Hulu?
From: No Spam on 14 Mar 2010 03:03 In article <Xns9D3A9B6774C50bearbottoms1gmaicom(a)69.16.185.247> Bear Bottoms <bearbottoms1(a)gmai.com> wrote: >StreamTransport is a program that can download encrypted video from Hulu. >I have tested this and while the download slow, it does work well and the >interface of the program is very nice. Use the 'visit Hulu' button in the >built-in browser to navigate to the movie you wish to download. Once the >download starts, you do not have to continue watching the movie. Find the >file easily by length and it usually starts with hulu plus a recognizable >name. It downloads as one file without the ads. > >I couldn't fast forward the video, but found out it is because Hulu does >not include keyframe objects. You can use flvmdi >http://www.buraks.com/flvmdi/ to inject metadata and include keyframe >objects which enables you to fast forward the video. This worked well in >KMPlayer and GOM. > >When Hulu changes/tweaks their encryption, this program will have to keep >up to continue being able to download the flv. For now, it works. > >http://www.streamtransport.com/ Install RealPlayer, check the option that allows downloading any video from your browser and it is done deal. I don't like RealPalyer usually, but that feature works on any site and any video.
From: VanguardLH on 14 Mar 2010 03:04 I went back to testing StreamTransport under a virtual machine (VM). This time, it managed to connect to the stream sources. Before it errored with a message that it could not establish a session with the stream source. Maybe it was busy, unreachable, or unresponsive at that time. It shows that this program has not automatic resume feature (along with an configurable polling interval to resume). It has a manual resume but I really didn't want to sit at my computer the whole time this product downloads the video stream - and which is slow because it does it in real-time. Because I could now see and click on the Download button, I was able to capture the video (as opposed to when I tested on my real host where the Download button was absent and the program's author never added a context menu to let me get at it that way). Either this program captures at the real-time rate (i.e., it records at the same rate as the video plays in the web browsers) or Hulu's Flash server negotiates a stream rate with this client that forces a real-time rate. I doubt the latter case since Replay Media Catcher can capture a video stream very quickly and long before the playback has completed in the web browser. A 1 hour 57 minute video takes 1 hour 57 minutes for this program to capture. With this slow a capture rate, the product screams for a scheduler where you can pick a detected stream source and decide when to capture it. Trying to start the captures for all streams would result in choking your bandwidth to be unusable for your own other Internet use. In a prior post, and because I couldn't initiate an actual capture under that test, I wondered if this program was acting as a client to use huludownload.com's online capture service. That is, this might be a client that sends the URL to the online capture service, the online server does the capturing, and then feeds the captured stream (decoded) to this client. However, I didn't see that in this capture. TCPview showed no connection by their program to any other server than those employed by Hulu in producing their video content (except for the occasional phone-home connect to eigbox.net but nowhere near long enough to be involved in the streaming of video traffic to do the capture). So that looks good. I'd still like this program to not phone-home, though. To see why the Download, Delete, and Clear buttons were missing under the real OS but appeared in the guest OS (in the VM), I decided to try to test for the obvious differences between the host and guest OS'es: DPI setting (affects text size in all applications) and using IE8 instead of IE7 (because this program appears to be an HTA - HTML Application). - In the guest OS (the VM), I upped the DPI from the default of 96 to 120 (to match the DPI setting in my host OS). Yep, that was it. A larger DPI setting means those buttons disappear. Going fullscreen for the program's window did not let me see those buttons. - I didn't have to install IE8 (the guest OS had IE7) because the DPI setting already exposed the defect in their design of their UI. Well, sorry guys, but I'm not squinting at my high-resolution screen (which makes all text smaller) just to get this program to be functional. I am also not going to change the screen resolution. LCD monitors are best viewed at their native resolution to eliminate jaggies, fuzziness, and color tinge that is typical when you use a screen resolution different than the monitor's native resolution. I could probably use the rules in my firewall to restrict StreamTransport from phoning-home (and make sure I didn't lose any functionality). I've done that with other apps, like Replay Media Catcher (payware). Not being to do an actual capture because the buttons are missing when the DPI setting is increased is a deal breaker for me. Otherwise, it looked like a doable product. I would have to find a utility that lets me run a program at a different DPI setting than all other windows for other programs currently open on the screen. Don't know if that's even possible. There is no link to a real contact to report bugs. I might've tried the Support page at huludownload.com but that page and the Download page are broken or don't exist yet. Although there is a link to "Forum" on their home page, they do NOT operate their own forum. Instead they shoot you off to a "StreamTransport" public forum hosted at rtmpe.com. This is like when anti-malware products don't provide their own forums and shoot you off to willderssecurity.com (or the old castlecops.com that went belly up). I can see and hope that reporting the DPI issue with the painting of their UI in the Bugs forum there gets any results. So the product looks usable. It really needs the following improvements or fixes: - *Automatic* resume on an error when connecting to or losing a connection to the stream's server. - Scheduling, so you can decide how to spread out the downloads and not completely consume all the bandwidth. * Alternatively, provide a max bandwidth that this program can consume so there is still some left while download the stream(s). - Fix their UI so the buttons which are critical for functionality still appear for those of us that up the DPI so we don't get headaches reading text on the screen. They were asked in the forum is they would consider going open source. Nope, nada, not now, probably never. Considering their huludownload.com site is a *payware* online capture service, I have to wonder about the survivability of this product as freeware. We've all seen were we get used as guinea pigs to iron out a product only to have it yanked away and go commercial.
From: VanguardLH on 14 Mar 2010 04:30
No Spam wrote: > In article <Xns9D3A9B6774C50bearbottoms1gmaicom(a)69.16.185.247> > Bear Bottoms <bearbottoms1(a)gmai.com> wrote: > >>StreamTransport is a program that can download encrypted video from Hulu. >>I have tested this and while the download slow, it does work well and the >>interface of the program is very nice. Use the 'visit Hulu' button in the >>built-in browser to navigate to the movie you wish to download. Once the >>download starts, you do not have to continue watching the movie. Find the >>file easily by length and it usually starts with hulu plus a recognizable >>name. It downloads as one file without the ads. >> >>I couldn't fast forward the video, but found out it is because Hulu does >>not include keyframe objects. You can use flvmdi >>http://www.buraks.com/flvmdi/ to inject metadata and include keyframe >>objects which enables you to fast forward the video. This worked well in >>KMPlayer and GOM. >> >>When Hulu changes/tweaks their encryption, this program will have to keep >>up to continue being able to download the flv. For now, it works. >> >>http://www.streamtransport.com/ > > Install RealPlayer, check the option that allows downloading any video > from your browser and it is done deal. > > I don't like RealPalyer usually, but that feature works on any site and > any video. Heh heh heh Try it on the Star Trek video at Hulu that I mentioned for Bear to test in his setup. I couldn't download the real movie (just the first ad movie) in my first test but did get the movie in my 2nd test using StreamTransport. All I get with RealPlayer's Web Downloading & Recording tool (which is a BHO added to the web browser, not a true interceptor of web traffic) was the first ad movie. Nothing after that gets recorded. There are multiple streams presented for this video and the RealPlayer capture tool only gets the first one. Well, if you like commercials then go for it over at Hulu. Even if you wait for the movie to start playing and the try to capture using RealPlayer, you still get just the first stream which is the ad video. The ad movies use RTMP so RealPlayer can capture those. The movie itself uses RTMPE (that can include SWF verification to protect the content) which RealPlayer doesn't support. |