I love the talks from TED and it so happens that lately I am in urge to watch (almost) all the episodes on the website whenever I can get the time! So, be it a 20 minute ride home from office or just another boring wait for someone, I WANT to watch TED! Alright, that’s exaggeration!

To download the episode, I can either subscribe to the channel on iTunes and make 300+ clicks to download each episode or else, I can do this:

1. Open up iTunes and connect to the Store. Search for “tedtalks” and select the “telktalks (hd)” channel.
   

    

2. Download and open up “URL Snooper” (Snoopy fella!). Select “Multimedia URLs (Simplify all)” from the Protocol Filter dropdown and start the sniffer!
   
3. Now, go back to iTunes and subscribe to the “TEDTalks (HD)” channel.
   

   

   Soon enough when you switch back to URL Snooper, you can see the direct links for the video!
   
   

“Why the hell should I bother to do all this, just hand over the URLs that you have fetched?” – I’m sure this pod has already burst it's seed of thought in you!

The whole TED Talks thing is just an example to let you know how one can use this utility to trace messages from websites that might get difficult in handling. iTunes subscription URL is SSL encrypted and when you are using Fiddler to trace the messages, you will see that the iTunes fails to subscribe to the channel. This happens because iTunes forces a check on the certificate that it receives from the server and if its incorrect, an exception is thrown! URL Snooper does not provide a proxy for the application instead listens to the incoming data. A parser in the application matches URL like content and displays it on the list.

So, this is URL Snooper! Try it for yourself, by the way, here’s all the videos from TED Talk, since 2006 in a list !

¶ 7:36:00 AM