Every so often I feel the need to replace the music coming out of my speakers with an audio drama. I used to listen to Maloney which is a detective story with, well, weird plots. The station used to provide MP3 files for download but since they revamped their website that is gone as the new one only provides flash streaming.
As far as I know, there is only one proper library to access media via Adobe HDS. There are two attempts and a PHP script.
There is, however, a little trick making things easier. The website exposes a HTML5 player if it thinks you’re a moron. Fortunately, it’s easy to make other people think that. The easiest thing to do is to have an IPaid User-Agent header. The website will play the media not via Adobe HDS (and flash) but rather via a similar, probably Apple HTTP Live Streaming, method. And that uses a regular m3u playlist with loads of tiny AAC fragments 🙂
The address of that playlist is easily guessable and I coded up a small utility here. It will print the ways to play the latest Maloney episode. You can then choose to either use HDS or the probably more efficient AAC version.
$ python ~/vcs/findmaloney/maloney.py mplayer -playlist http://srfaodorigin-vh.akamaihd.net/i/world/maloney/04df3324-4096-4dd5-b7c3-6f9b904e3f91.,q10,q20,.mp4.csmil/master.m3u8 livestreamer "hds://http://srfaodorigin-vh.akamaihd.net/z/world/maloney/04df3324-4096-4dd5-b7c3-6f9b904e3f91.,q10,q20,.mp4.csmil/manifest.f4m" best
enjoy!
