ChrisDevBox

This is a simple and easy tutorial on how to retrieve (in real-time) all your videos from break.com and put them on your website using JavaScript.

In real-time meaning a call to break.com’s WEB API will be made every time you reload the page.

Now, this is not a feature they have exposed to the public yet, but it is there in case you are nerdy enough to figure it out. So this is really a good ol’ innocent hack

Anyway, here is how you do it

1. First, before we get started you need to install firebug (Firefox plugin) or charles proxy (or any other http packet sniffer you are familiar with)
2. Get familiar packet sniffing, go to a few sites, check the requests and responses.
3. Ok, now go to the site and navigate your break.com home page (example: break.com/ScarFace)
4. Inside Charles or Firebug look for a URL request that starts with profile-websvc.break.com (pretty fancy naming convention, I wonder who came up with it)
5. Now look for a URL that has the following path: /Membership/Handlers/Profile/Folders/
6. Copy the full URL, should be something like this

http://profile-websvc.break.com/Membership/Handlers/Profile/Folders/FolderHandler.ashx?
invoke=getmemberfoldertree&siteId=1&mid=YmZgonOnC5zw2zpAB1Bnkw==&
callback=breakFoldersObj.renderContentFolders&noCacheIE=1213496038109

Note: The above is a JSON string encapsulated inside a callback/wrapper method.

Now you probably don’t need the whole thing (URL), but for this example we will. If you click on the link above (Inside Firefox) it will display the JSON string for ya and the callback function. If you are a savvy JavaScript developer that’s all you need and you can go on and build your mashup.

If you need some extra help you can take a look at my own example here:

http://www.chrisdevbox.com/lab/breakapi/myvideos.html

In order to make the embeds work you’ll need to download the base64 js utility.

Here is the full source

http://www.chrisdevbox.com/lab/breakapi/myvideos.code.html

You’ll see the call to the base64 utils in there.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Hacks, Mashup.