There are lots of sites that offer streaming audio and video services these days. A lot of these use Flash video, but some older sites use other streaming technologies, including Real, Windows Media and QuickTime to deliver the content.

Downloading these streams so you can save them for later is almost always possible. It’s worth pointing out at this point that you should check as to whether you have the legal right to dump streams to your machine, but I’ll leave it to you to do this responsibly.

One of the ways you can dump this type of stream to your computer is to use the media player Mplayer.

With Mplayer already installed, you simply use the -dumpstream command line option to tell it to read the stream and save it to a file (by default, called stream.dump).

$ mplayer -dumpstream streamurl

streamurl in this example is the URL of the stream, which usually begins with rtsp:// or mms://. The hardest part of actually ripping a stream in this way is discovering this URL, as sites often don’t make this immediately available.

I’d recommend the Firefox extension UnPlug for this purpose, as it can often discover the stream URL for you, even if it is unable to do the whole ripping process. You can then copy and paste that URL into your mplayer -dumpstream command, and you’ll get the media file.

Again, though, do this responsibly and legally.

Wires are for suckers. In this day and age, wireless headphones are where it’s at. While we may not be able to drop the power cord for the time being, we can at least get rid of annoying, east-to-tangle headphone wires by using a Bluetooth headset.

But no, you say, Bluetooth audio sounds horrible. Well my friend, you were probably using a low-quality profile such as HSP. If you want full-quality stereo profile, you want A2DP.

The first requirement is a Bluetooth adapter on your PC or laptop. The second is a Bluetooth headset that supports the A2DP profile, such as the Jabra BT60s headphones. Most earbud headsets don’t support A2DP, so you’re out of luck if you own one. Finally, you’ll need the BlueZ Utils package installed.

Now we’re on to the actual setup. A lot of A2DP tutorials out there require you to install some custom system service or do some weird voodoo dance to get them to work. The reference I have found so far has worked every time for me. Most of this is simplified instructions from the BlueZ wiki, so if you are looking for additional setups I suggest you look there after trying this.

Feeling lazy and want me to do this all for you? Well, today is your lucky day. I’ve made a custom script that will automatically configure it all for you.

Read the rest of A2DP (Stereo Bluetooth Headset) on Linux

With PulseAudio already in Fedora and soon to be in Ubuntu 8.04, it is sure to get even more popularity. But what is so special about it? To many, it just seems like yet another replacement for esound. And while PulseAudio can be dropped right in to replace ESD without problems, it offers so much more.

One big feature is the volume manager. While it doesn’t seem to be packaged with the PulseAudio server itself, it can be installed as pavucontrol.

The screenshot above really speaks for itself. With PulseAudio, not only do you have control over the total sound level, but also over each application individually. This is a feature of Windows Vista, but now you can experience it on your Linux or BSD system as long as you use PulseAudio.