Is There any ways to scrape the site containing flash player???

shekarkcb has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks,

I was into scraping sites from 2 months. I was using WWW::Mechanize. But now i fell into real trap when the sites started using flash players in them , and not giving the direct URLs for their content. Like earlier they are giving directly in their HTML Source, so i was getting the urls of videos very easy. But now they started embedding a flash player. (Like swf player or something like that...) and then they are passing some id's and those player will recognize that and will play. It is possible to get the source url of those by some tools (Like "Sothink Web Video Down loader for firefox" ...) but since i wanted to automate that whole process there must be some Packages in PERL which deals with these ... can anyone help me to get out of this ???

Thanks,
ShekarKCB

Comment on Is There any ways to scrape the site containing flash player???

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Re: Is There any ways to scrape the site containing flash player??? by dHarry (Abbot) on Sep 01, 2008 at 12:21 UTC
I think it's possible using Macromedia's AMF protocol, i.e. request the data you want from the web server. I am not sure if there is module for it in Perl. You might want to look into AMF::Perl. Normally, (decent) web sites offer a non-Flash alternative to the user! Disclaimer: my Flash experience is (fortunately) outdated.	[reply]
Re: Is There any ways to scrape the site containing flash player??? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 01, 2008 at 12:44 UTC
There's no way to know what URLs an arbitrary program will fetch once executed. The URLs it downloads could even be different every run. If you know that a specific player fetches a given URL for given inputs, you can extract the inputs and fetch the computed URL. WWW::Mechanize doesn't recognize any players.	[reply]
Re: Is There any ways to scrape the site containing flash player??? by Anonymous Monk on Sep 01, 2008 at 12:05 UTC
t is possible to get the source url of those by some tools (Like "Sothink Web Video Down loader for firefox" ...) but since i wanted to automate that whole process there must be some Packages in PERL which deals with these ... can anyone help me to get out of this ??? No. Also, its Perl or perl but never PERL.	[reply]