I wanted a video from PBS because it had Alex the African Grey parrot in it. I didn’t want the rest, so my plan was to let it load in Mplayer within Firefox, then save a copy and edit out everything except the bit with Alex. PBS, however, doesn’t allow their videos to be saved, so I had to kind of “go around” that by using Mplayer from the terminal and dumping the stream. BTW, when I forget again what the command is to grab a streaming Windows Media file…

mplayer mms://url -dumpstream -dumpfile foo.wmv

Anyway, it downloaded, and I had to smile because Linux is so much fun that even the terminal has a somewhat sarcastic sense of humour. Maybe that’s why I like it–real, live people wrote this code, and real, live people have a sense of humour (most of ’em, anyway).