Playing TAU lectures from videos.tau.ac.il

[Elazar Leibovich]

First and foremost I think that you don't understand my question.
I'll emphasize it again.
I'm NOT interested in a way to access the TAU videos without username and
password.
I AM interested in a way to access the TAU videos WITH my [1] legitimate
username and password, from a Linux system. Which means, in the bottom line,
using mplayer or VLC.
That is, the point about distributing the mms:// links is not valid for my
question. The mms:// shouldn't help you if you don't have username and
password for the videos site in the TAU. The mms links should be password
protected.

However, no authentication request prompted when I fed the link to vlc or
mplayer. Maybe they just don't support authenticated mms links
correctly. What probably happened is, there was no good way to authenticate
the mms:// links in the server, so they used a hacky way which happens to
work for WMP only.

It might be that the TAU want people to access their content exclusively
with WMP. I'm not sure if they can legally enforce that (I'm pretty sure
viewing copyrighted material with a player not authorized by the rights
owner is considered fair use, but maybe they can say "hey, student! If
you're accessing our videos in our website you must use WMP, otherwise stay
out", and it would be something like HASAGAT GVUL to use that from linux).

However, I can tell you for sure from my personal experience, that when
browsing the videos site of the TAU there was no notice about any
restriction as of how to access the videos.

About your second point. I was always disappointed when using the official
support channel for linux support. Usually the answer is "we don't support
linux". The linux support you get at Linux-IL, is actually much better than
the official channel.

[1] my friend that is, I'm asking for a less computer iterated friend.

2010/7/22 Ariel Biener <ariel at post.tau.ac.il>

>  On 07/22/2010 09:06 AM, Boris shtrasman wrote:
>
> Don't know if that the case , but at least for some I had to work with you
> must login to a web site (full auth) prior to to that the server will
> disable the access to the files. Also make sure with wireshark.
>
> Did you try with a perl script ? to connect and download the mms ?
>
>
> I do not understand this thread. It is obvious that TAU does not want you
> to circumvent
> it's access protection. Even if this was possible, why would you do it ?
> If you're pissed
> that it doesn't work well with Linux, and you are a TAU student/staff
> member, contact
> the TAU helpdesk, and open a ticket on the subject, and request they find a
> suitable
> solution for you.
>
> That said, as TAUs CISO I am *telling* you that we are interested to see
> our staff
> and students access our protected data in the proper way, and that any
> other person
> is kept out.
>
> Until we enforced this, many students sites not affiliated with TAU have
> published direct mms:// links to our content, which became available to
> anyone, anywhere,
> regardless of being affiliated with TAU or not, and thus infringing on our
> copyrights, on
> our academic staff copyrights, and also on Film studios copyright for some
> of our material.
>
>  If a staff member or student has a problem, we can find solutions via our
> internal means of
> doing so, and not via asking Linux-IL how to circumvent us.
>
> --Ariel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20100724/ed759043/attachment.html>