The Comedy Central RSS Creator has been updated, and renamed as the Comedy Central Feed Creator. Feeds are now available in both RSS and Atom. Feeds also now point to Comedy Central’s Flash video player rather than the old Windows Media format videos. The new player works much better.
Also, the new feeds include video descriptions (in addition to titles), durations, and download links for the Flash video files in both high- and low-quality versions. If you’re using a podcast viewer that can handle Flash video, you can also subscribe to the feeds as podcasts. Finally, the feed creator is caching now. Rather than checking for new videos every time a feed is requested, it only checks once per hour. As a result, the response time should be much faster, which is good for everyone involved: your feed reader, the Make Data Make Sense server, and Comedy Central’s server.
Please leave a note if you have any problems with the improved version, or anything else you’d like to see.
2 Comments
Thanks for your work! Got any tips on how to get the .flv URLs for clips that aren’t in your feeds? There are javascript “bookmarklets” for YouTube and other sites, but I haven’t been able to find one for Comedy Central yet. Irritatingly, I’m not even looking to download any video to keep it… I just want to watch it, and I happen to not run windows! Just like with DeCSS, I am forced to seek out illicit copying tools for mere playback.
Comedy Central’s web staff should be fired
Comedy Central’s video files are hidden a few steps deep, and they don’t even have stable locations. The locations are created new whenever your browser requests the file containing the locations, and they expire some time later. Here’s a quick rundown on how it works:
Any page that plays videos on ComedyCentral.com loads a file with an address like this:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/xml/data_mini.jhtml?xml_id=UNIQUE_SHOW_ID
That XML file contains a list of individual video clips, with addresses like this:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/xml/flv_xml_gen.jhtml?ml_video=UNIQUE_VIDEO_CLIP_ID&hiLoPref=lo
The “hiLoPref” determines the quality/size of the video. When you load that URL, ComedyCentral.com asks Akamai.net (a streaming video service) to create a file for the video. Akamai.net returns the URL to ComedyCentral.com, and ComedyCentral.com passes the URL on to you. That’s the URL of the FLV files that I put in the feeds. But it expires after a few hours, so I update the URL every time a feed is requested.
I hope this helps.
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