Presidential Debate to mp3 HOWTO

Bill McGonigle — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:33:00 -0400

To get the presidential debates as mp3’s:

go to the [CSPAN YouTube channel](www.youtube.com/cspan)
Play the debate (before you go home, e.g.)
Pull the debate .flv file from your cache (e.g. FlashTmp0)
run it through ffmpeg to extract the mp3

To get the file from your cache, figure out where the flash cache is and run an rsync job like so (OSX paths here):

#!/bin/tcsh
while (1)
#make this flashcopy directory first
rsync -av --partial /private/var/tmp/folders.$UID/TemporaryItems/FlashTmp* flashcopy 
sleep 1
end

To convert with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i debate.flv -acodec copy debate.mp3

The file’s sound track is already mp3 so ffmpeg simply extracts and containerizes it for you.

And no doubt you can do something easy like download it from iTunes or PBS instead.

The BFC Computing Weblog: Presidential Debate to mp3 HOWTO

Presidential Debate to mp3 HOWTO