Downloading a C-Span video to watch on my TV later.
Here's the video:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/O...t/0/stop/10380
I've tried Safari's Activity window, Cosmopod, I've tried using several different extensions with Firefox, I've tried MPEG Streamclip (usually successful where others fail), but everything has failed. Please help me scrape this video. I want to watch it later on my TV.
Yes, I can pay, but at $7 I'm not a fool.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/O...t/0/stop/10380
I've tried Safari's Activity window, Cosmopod, I've tried using several different extensions with Firefox, I've tried MPEG Streamclip (usually successful where others fail), but everything has failed. Please help me scrape this video. I want to watch it later on my TV.
Yes, I can pay, but at $7 I'm not a fool.
Comments
Which seems strange.
There's no video at that link. It's just a Flash element that opens to reveal a static image of the former Google chief.
Which seems strange.
You must have click to Flash or a Flash blocker enabled. Or a slow (temporarily or otherwise) internet conniption. And no, I can't screen record the whole video as it's 3 hours long and I don't even have sound when I do it. And the quality is reduced also. File size would be too big etc.
http://f.cl.ly/items/3n0p1V3C0j3I0q1M1f2N/video.mov
You must have click to Flash or a Flash blocker enabled.
http://f.cl.ly/items/3n0p1V3C0j3I0q1M1f2N/video.mov
Nope.
That's so weird. It just refuses to acknowledge that it's a video for me. Sorry.
There's no video at that link. It's just a Flash element that opens to reveal a static image of the former Google chief.
It shows up ok for me but starts on a freeze frame and you have to click play to start streaming.
It's a streaming video, which is why it can't be saved using the activity window but you can use a stream recorder.
The tricky part is finding the URL of the source clip but decompiling the swf player into source code shows that they get the URLs from a PHP script along with the video id:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/common/se...397&checkFiles
This tells you the path names of the media files. They seem to have split this video into 4 parts. They are also using the Wowza Media Server to stream MP4 files - doesn't really need to use a Flash media player at all.
Wowza formats their URLs like this:
[protocol-method]://[wowza-address]/[application]/[application-instance]/[stream-name]
which makes the video links (without spaces):
rtmp
All you have to do then is feed that into a stream recorder like RTMPDump (Mac binary here http://trick77.com/downloads/ ) using the command:
rtmpdump -r "<above link no spaces>" -o "/Users/Ireland/videoistolefromcspan.mp4"
It looks like a huge video though - they encoded it at 540p. The 4 segments look to be around 1GB each.
$7 actually doesn't sound too bad.
Anyone else have a solution to my predicament?
Unfortunately not.
When I go to that URL I get a C-SPAN video library page with in big bold red letters: NO PROGRAM FOUND WITH ID. That's the bad news.
The good news is that it's not a problem on your side, but on theirs, and that you're not the only one who can't view/download that video.
$7 actually doesn't sound too bad.
You might be right lol.
I installed RTMPDump, but can't locate it?
All you have to do then is feed that into a stream recorder like RTMPDump (Mac binary here http://trick77.com/downloads/ ) using the command:
rtmpdump -r "<above link no spaces>" -o "/Users/Ireland/videoistolefromcspan.mp4"
Thanks a million for your help but could you clarify precisely what the command is? I find this confusing:
tmpdump -r "<above link no spaces>" -o "/Users/Ireland/videoistolefromcspan.mp4"
I installed RTMPDump, but can't locate it?
It's in /usr/local/bin and run via the command-line. You might have to change permissions on this folder as well as /usr/local/lib using chmod if it can't read it e.g sudo chmod -R 755 /usr/local/bin.
could you clarify precisely what the command is?
There are 4 links to put in and the commands for each should be:
rtmpdump -r "rtmp://video.c-spanarchives.org:1935/fastplay/301681-1/mp4:full/2011/09/21/20110921130000003_hd.mp4" -o "/Users/Ireland/video001.flv"
rtmpdump -r "rtmp://video.c-spanarchives.org:1935/fastplay/301681-1/mp4:full/2011/09/21/20110921140000003_hd.mp4" -o "/Users/Ireland/video002.flv"
rtmpdump -r "rtmp://video.c-spanarchives.org:1935/fastplay/301681-1/mp4:full/2011/09/21/20110921150000003_hd.mp4" -o "/Users/Ireland/video003.flv"
rtmpdump -r "rtmp://video.c-spanarchives.org:1935/fastplay/301681-1/mp4:full/2011/09/21/20110921160000003_hd.mp4" -o "/Users/Ireland/video004.flv"
It seems they are actually in an flv container so you will need to use the .flv extension. If you use Perian, this will open in QTPro and you can probably do a passthrough export to an MP4 container and then be able to play the videos without re-encoding.
edit: You're probably going to want to run the 4 downloads together in 4 separate terminal windows because it'll only stream them down and not go at full download speed.