Collect All of Rick Mercer's Rants!

Somtimes, I think that web developers go out of their way to keep people from downloading the videos they stream from their sites. I have no idea why they do this since it only helps to lessen the load on their servers when people download and redistribute the video clips themselves, but they do it anyway.

Of course, this doesn't stop any reasonably talented geek with a Linux box. The following code will let you grab all of Rick Mercer's previous rants from this year (lets hear it for simple naming conventions!)

$ for d in nov.7 oct.31 oct.24 oct.17 oct.10 oct.03; do
  FILE="ricks_rant_$d.2006.wmv"
  mencoder -o "$FILE" \
    -ovc lavc \
    -oac lavc \
    -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq=4:vbitrate=500:acodec=ac3:abitrate=128 \
    mms://a1740.v146341.c14634.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1740/14634/1/origin.media.cbc.ca/cbc.ca/mercerreport/videos/$FILE
done

I'll be putting this in my cron from now on:

00 22 * * 3 FILE=`date +ricks_rant_%b.%d.%Y.wmv | tr [A-Z] [a-z]`; mencoder -o /path/to/rantRepository/$FILE -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq=4:vbitrate=500:acodec=ac3:abitrate=128 mms://a1740.v146341.c14634.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1740/14634/1/origin.media.cbc.ca/cbc.ca/mercerreport/videos/$FILE

I <3 Linux