Local downloading of the Clone Wars animation

Over at <a href-"http://www.starwars.com">starwars.com you can view the Clone Wars animation via a Quicktime stream. What if you wanted to download it locally and view the whole thing in your own time.

Here is Quicktime ripping 101 :)

Tools:

wget or curl

packet sniffer like tcpdump or windump

Skill set:

You should know how to basically use the above tools.

Background:

I wanted to backup the copies of the clone wars animation found at starwars.com for my own private viewing offline. Using the above tools I set out to do just that.

Step 1:

Ok so your looking at the Clone Wars animation via a stream currently. The first step is to find the URL of the Quicktime itself. What I did first was get to the page that links to the stream. Next I open a terminal window (I use OSX) and run the following command:

sudo tcpdump -Xa -s 4096 host progressive1.stream.aol.com

Type in your root password, then click on the link, once you start seeing data, hit CTRL-C to stop the capture.

You might be wondering why your capturing data from progressive1.stream.aol.com instead of starwars.com. At first that is what I did, but I found that starwars.com redirects to cartoonnetwork.com then over to progressive1.stream.aol.com. So to cut down following all those breadcrumbs, I just go straight to the source.

Step 2:

Scroll up the terminal window until to see the GET line in the capture. It will read something like

GET /turner/gl/cartoon_net/starwars/

Followed by the chapter directory and the MOV file your looking for.

Step 3:

Run wget with the following command line:

wget http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/turner/gl/cartoon_net/starwars/chapter/file.mov

Using the proper chapter and MOV filename found in step 2.

Step 4:

Once the movie is downloaded, all you need to do is watch it whenever you feel like it :)

Please keep the download to yourself. Don't trade it around, LucasArts spent a lot of time and money making these animations.