Diggnation Live: Except Not

On the latest Diggnation (Edward Cold Hands), Kevin Rose promised to broadcast the St Louis live show over the ‘net, using his Yahoo! Live stream. He also mentioned that he would post an announcement about it on his Pownce about it, just to make sure. Lo and behold, you log on to Netvibes to check the Pownce RSS… only find two things:

• You just missed the live taping of another show… by 8 hours.
• St Louis’ bars don’t all have internet.

What does this mean? There’s a new episode on the way, in addition to the live show… and there’s not going to be a feed to the live show. What a set-up!

They probably should have looked into it before announcing it, as opposed to just telling everybody “Oh, well, never mind, it’s not going down” eight hours before it was supposed to happen. I had this planned out for a few days now. Thanks.

Google Video’s Downloads, and How to Hack It

You’ll notice, browsing Google Video’s selection, that some videos have a “download” button, others don’t. For example, a user put together all of RvB Seasons 1-5, but 3-5 aren’t download-able… or are they? Firebug reveals that the download button does this (taken from the “Red vs Blue Season 2″ video):
onDownloadClick("4833169745208123782","","",ele("platform").value)
Interesting… the long number is the exact number in the url:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4833169745208123782
And ele("platform").value? Well, that’s just a JS function for some DOM work to get the value of the “platform” dropbox, who’s only option sets the value to “ipod”. A little JS code hacking, and here’s a work-all function:
onDownloadClick("[insert docid here]","","","ipod")
Using Firebug, select the “thumbsetc” div, and insert this bit of HTML:
<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick='onDownloadClick("[insert docid here]","","","ipod")'>Download</a>
<!-- Or, if you want the button... -->
<img onclick="onDownloadClick("[docid]","","","ipod")" src="/static/btn_download.gif"/>
(No, I don’t know why the spaces are there… take them out, since I can’t) Substituting the docid for the text. Now just click Edit again, and a Download link should appear somewhere in the right-hand pane. Click it to download an MP4 of whatever video you may be watching!

If anybody can patch together a Greasemonkey script for this, let me know!

Update: Amazingly as this worked the first time, it now finds all sorts of errors. It’s a lot easier just to find a video that can be downloaded, fire up Firebug and edit the download button’s source to change the pointed-to docid…

E3 (Nintendo Conference)

Yeah, so, after reading cipher’s opinion of the Nintendo conference (and posting my comment), I realized that I couldn’t just “not watch it.” I mean, this is the Nintendo press conference at E3! Yeah, I missed the live stream, but Gamespot still has all of the conferences up for viewing. So I’ve decided I’m going to watch them all. The Nintendo and Sony one today, Microsoft’s tomorrow.

First off, I just gotta say, wasn’t as big a let down as expected. Could’ve used a bit more, uh, interesting news, but whatever. It’s worth watching, as long as you skip the stupid “praise for the Wii” videos they show between announcement chunks. Anyway…

So, big news for Wii. Fifa ‘08 (definitely getting this) and NFL ‘08 are both confirmed online play. I don’t know about the gameplay, but at least they’re getting something done over there.

They also announced Mario Kart Wii (working title), which does away with the stupid “double dash” feature. A new “Wii Wheel” debuts with the game. And online? Yeah, it’s got online. Not just racing, of course. Remember battle mode? Yes, that is online too. And it’s got enough control schemes to be utilized by new players and vets alike.

Brawl’s biggest news, though, was the release date: December 3rd, 2007. I don’t know about the rest of you, but suddenly, I stopped caring about anything else at that point. Cue the fanboys! I just home GameStop or Play N Trade starts selling their pre-orders soon. Today would be nice.

RvB Over 100

No, no, not some insanely complicated math problem. Red vs Blue, a Halo (1 and then 2) based show has, sadly, reached its end with episode #100, concluding season 5. RoosterTeeth (don’t ask), the group that produced it, released RvB 100 just today, and began taking preorders for the Season 5 DVD.

It was a great series, and amassed huge popularity during its 4-year-run (5 seasons, 4 years. Go figure) as you can tell from the forums. I learned about it from James (he’s going to a different school now, since 6th grade) in 5th grade, and since then, have been keeping my eye on it. But now that it’s over…

Torrents! I don’t have the hard drive space to store all of the episodes (1-3 and about half of 4 is about 2.5 GB), so I’m just getting the old episodes off of The Pirate Bay and burning them to VCDs. As Colin (pyosnka) says, “There are always reruns on BitTorrent!” RoosterTeeth used to have a rather large archive of all the episodes available, but has cut that down to a “running archive” of about 5 episodes that started at 1 and is now at 38, so you can’t get the old ones off of the site itself. But since they’re low on seeders (people who have 100% of the downloaded file and only upload to others) you can also get every episode from Machinima.com (episode 1 being here).