10 News video on a Mac (and VMIX on TV!)

published on 2007-05-25 in video , computing

My company, VMIX was recently on the local San Diego ABC affiliate, 10 News. I was actually in a few of the shots and when looking for the video, found that the 10news.com website's windows media video player didn't work on my Mac. So I created a quick hack to return the URL to the .asx file so I can play it with VLC.

Search for the story and pull up the video detail page. The URL should be something like this: http://www.10news.com/video/13299238/detail.html

Open up "Terminal" on your mac and paste this command, replacing the first URL with the URL of your video detail page:

curl http://www.10news.com/video/13299238/detail.html -s   
| grep 200k   
| awk -F"'" '{print "http://mfile.akamai.com/12922/wmv/vod.ibsys.com"$2}'   
| sed 's/wmv$/asx/g'

The result should be something like this:

http://mfile.akamai.com/12922/wmv/vod.ibsys.com/2007/0511/13299238.200k.asx

Which you should be able to play in VLC. You can also include that URL in your blog to quote the story. Hit this link to see the video coverage and my geeky mug at the keyboard. Video clip courtesy of 10news.com.

Update: Url's changed to local video.