How can I recognize the Flash url in a page script?

Factual Questions
1

I know how to get the page source, but I’m not sure which urls are the ones for the flash items.
An example is at the top of this page: http://www.uclick.com/client/spi/fcx/
[Note: sometimes it’s not a flash but a gif. Those url’s I can find by right clicking.
When I right click on a flash item, though, it doesn’t give me the option for properties]
And please don’t ask why I want to know. I’m just curious.

2

You won’t always be able to find it by viewing the source, since it could be dynamically generated, but generally, look for one of these two things:

  1. an <EMBED> tag with the appropriate “type” attribute (e.g. application/x-shockwave-flash) and a “src” attribute. That’s your URL in the src attribute.
  2. an <OBJECT> tag with a codebase pointing at the install location for the shockwave player. Inside this tag will be a PARAM tag with NAME=“movie”. The “value” attribute on this PARAM tag is your URL.

Here’s the snippet from your sample page, which contains both of the above, both pointing to the same SWF file:



<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0"
 WIDTH="600" HEIGHT="450" id="xword_online_mx1" ALIGN="middle">
      <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="http://www.uclick.com/puzzles/fcx/xword_online_mx1.swf?dt=071114&xurl=http://www.uclick.com/puzzles/fcx/universal_xw_control.xml">
      <PARAM NAME="quality" VALUE="high">
      <PARAM NAME="scale" VALUE="exactfit">
      <PARAM NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="#FFFFFF">
      <PARAM NAME="SeamlessTabbing" value="false">
      <EMBED src="http://www.uclick.com/puzzles/fcx/xword_online_mx1.swf?dt=071114&xurl=http://www.uclick.com/puzzles/fcx/universal_xw_control.xml" quality=high scale=exactfit bgcolor=#FFFFFF  WIDTH="600" HEIGHT="450" ALIGN="middle" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
 SeamlessTabbing="false">
      </EMBED>
</OBJECT>
3

Note that in this case, the files ending with “.swf” are the ones you want.

4

If you just want to snag a copy of the Flash for later enjoyment, look in your temporary internet files folder for things ending in “.swf” . You can save them elsewhere on your hard-drive & then just double-click to watch.

Note that recently more sites are getting more agressive about trying to make that harder to do. Not that they succeed 100%, but the days of trivially copying Flash content from sites is slowly coming to a close.

5

If your are using firefox there are plenty off addons that make this a lot easier to do!
Just have a browse on the firefox extension page.

6

Thanks for the input.

Tried Firefox and didn’t like it.
But actually I don’t want to see the files again and again, the opposite: I want to find the domains the flash ads reside on and add them to my Host file so they never load at all.

For flashing gifs, you can simply hit Esc and the darn things stop blinking.
If only Flash ads work the same way. It’s hard to work a crossword puzzle with blinking and flashing going on the whole time.

7

Thanks for the input.

Tried Firefox and didn’t like it.
But actually I don’t want to see the files again and again, the opposite: I want to find the domains the flash ads reside on and add them to my Host file so they never load at all.

For flashing gifs, you can simply hit Esc and the darn things stop blinking.
If only Flash ads work the same way. It’s hard to work a crossword puzzle with blinking and flashing going on the whole time.

8

Ad HTML code is often dynamically generated, as galt said, so that ads can be swapped out by the ad buyer and to obscure the final URL. Sometimes you see off-site JavaScript links; these usually reside on an adserver and contain document.write() statements to insert the embedded ads. The page you link contains two JavaScript links near the top of the page (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/ak/ads/mjx{1,2}.js) which in turn generate links to the actual adserver.

(The first JS link just defines code to generate a static image and link. The second one, loaded if the browser supports it, actually links to another JavaScript file, this one hosted on the adserver. This JavaScript source is dynamically generated on the adserver and contains the code to generate all of the banner ads, some of which may be Flash ads (possibly hosted at yet another site; but by inhibiting load of adserver content you will break the links before getting here). Here is a link to this source; note that on reload the source changes.)

In this case, you’re in luck; the adserver currently has a separate hostname, mjx.ads.nwsource.com, so its links are easily blocked in /etc/hosts.