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.

Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 3 today, and the Linux efforts behind it are starting to show even more. This release, being a beta, is surprisingly stable. Here’s the killer that makes this beta release amazing: more GTK support.

Look at those tabs. They match perfectly with the default Clearlooks theme. It isn’t true GTK like Epiphany, but it sure looks like it now. Instead of using custom icons by default, Firefox will now obey your theme settings. For those icons that don’t have an appropriate GTK equivalent, Tango icons will be used. Check out the popup menu at the right. Notice all of the visual cues for the menu items now? It’s GTK heaven.

Thought the Location bar was smart in the previous beta? Well, guess what, it’s even smarter now; so much that it is beginning to get creepy. Think of a page title but not the URL itself? No problem, Firefox 3 has you covered.

Other additions to this release include a refined bookmarks manager, a ton of bugfixes (the usual) and UI enhancements in several areas. Overall, it seems like the Mozilla team is really looking to get rid of the ugly fat image of Firefox on most systems, and streamline the animal into something much faster, especially in the area of Linux. Much of the newfound Linux support is all thanks to you users out there who tested the nightly builds and commented (and complained) on them. See, you can make a difference!

Mozilla have announced the release of Firefox 3.0 Beta 1, the ninth major development release of the Firefox 3.0 product.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the ninth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features cited in Firefox 3.0 include various security enhancements, a new download manager supporting resumable downloads, tagging bookmarks for better organisation, a ‘Smart Places’ folder for accessing recent and favourite sites and many bug fixes over the 2.0 series.

Of course, Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is exactly that - beta-quality software, so it may crash, break things and eat your data. I recommend everyone who does give this a try to back up their profile folder before installing.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and can be downloaded from this page.