Streaming video success

Our last blog discussed the problems we were having with capturing video files from streaming sites.  At the time, we were attempting to capture the video from websites such as YouTube and Vimeo.  FAW’s site does state that it can capture video files, such as avi, mp4, and wmv, but we were unsuccessful in gathering these files.  FAW Tool review Part 4 discusses these problems in more detail.

After some discussion, we started to believe that YouTube and Vimeo may be using a style sheet that points to the video and then downloads it for the user to view. This will prevent users form being able to download videos illegally from YouTube.  It would make sense that YouTube and Vimeo would try to make it difficult for viewers to download the videos off their website; each time a user views the video it’s a hit for the website and a possible source of revenue.

We still wanted to continue testing to understand what was needed for a video file to be downloaded.  We decided on uploading a video to the LCDI blog so that the video would be accessible and then  went to the LCDI blog page and made a post that was just the video.  The video file was a .WMV file under 10mb titled My-Movie.wmv. We then published the post using WordPress.

Figure 1

Using FAW, we navigated to the post and entered acquisition mode.  FAW had trouble loading the video and displayed the link to the video instead of the video player (Figure 1).  Google Chrome on the host machine showed a window similar to QuickTime Player.  Although it was a just link to the video, FAW still was able to extract the video file and saving it to the Object folder shown in figure 2. FAW Captured the video in its entirety.

Figure 2

-Nick Aspinwall

LCDI