How to extract video URLs from YouTube

I know there are many tools out there that allow you to download videos from YouTube, like the Video Download Helper for Firefox, even online tools that convert the audio to mp3. The reasons I’m writing this article are a) because sometimes you just need the URL, for example to watch a video with a much less ressource consuming player like VLC or ffplay, b) because sometimes you just want to listen to the audio and save up even more ressources by not decoding the video and c) because I can 😉

How to stream multiple TV channels with a single DVB-T tuner using VLC

DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial) is the European-based digital terrestrial television broadcast transmission standard. The system transmits video, audio and data streams encoded in a MPEG transport stream which can be decoded by different types of receiver cards, boxes or USB sticks. Every broadcast channel with its video, audio and data stream is multiplexed into a MPEG program stream and one or more of these are multiplexed into a MPEG transport stream which is then transmitted on a single frequency. So basically your tuner card/box/stick is receiving multiple broadcast channels on a single frequency at once and your tuner software selects the program stream you intend to watch or record. In this article I will explain how you can demultiplex the transport stream and watch or record multiple broadcast channels at the same time with a single tuner.

How to play flash videos with the media player of your choice

Notice: This method will probably not work on all YouTube videos.

Remember the good old days when you could pause a flash video, let it buffer and play the video with the media player of your choice by opening the corresponding file from the /tmp directory?

Well that’s still possible. However the video-files are deleted from the /tmp directory. So you need to find the PID of the flash plugin-container to open the video from /proc/PID/fd/.