"[AFL games] from 2008 and 2009 are available only as Windows Media rtsp streams. The quality is more-or-less the same: 672x544 resolution at a video rate of 1.99 mbps, though it turns out to be harder to determine the link address and harder again to download the streams to disk files."
So there are two problems: first we need the urls of the media streams we want, and then we need some means of recording them. But first some background knowledge.
rtsp?
This is Real Time Streaming Protocol, and all you need to know is that it is is a network control protocol designed for use in entertainment and communications systems, that some media players can handle it directly and some can't, and if they can't they may negotiate an alternative distribution over the very common http protocol.
record media streams?
There are many providers that supply video on a watch-now basis, and they do it by packaging in stream form. These streams are not intended to be recorded, and this means that there are several commercial packages that do just that, in exchange for money. I have tried a few without much liking any of them, and nowadays I try to use VLC Media Player which is very powerful (if sometimes hard to drive) and also free. And also works on ten versions of Linux as well as OSX, iOS, Android and of course Windows. Everybody ought to have it.
VLC is supposed to handle rtsp streams but it doesn't do it very well, at least in version 1.1 11, and is much happier being fed over http. Fortunately this is possible.
How to discover the urls,
and who doesn't need to know.
Second part first: you only need to read the following if (a) you want to, or (b) you want a game that Essendon wasn't in. Bombers fans can afford drop right down to the How to record a stream section because all the links they will need can be found at the end of this post.
But if you are still here, to continue, the DownloadHelper/FireFox solution used in my Post number 2 will not work with stream videos and you will have to resort to eavesdropping on your browser's communications with the outside world. The application I use for this is URL Snooper, a program written to help users locate the urls of audio and video files so that they can be recorded. Get this program from http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/urlsnooper/index.html. It is donationware, which means that it is available for free but you can pay if your own sense of justice tells you to. It runs only on Windows, and (sorry) I don't know about anything else.
So, assuming you have a Windows machine, install URL Snooper, turn it on and click the Sniff Network button. The Keyword Filter box is to reduce clutter and it would be good at this point to type a team name in there.
As previously, go to BigPond AFL Videos and use the fancy navigator to select ON DEMAND, Essendon TV (or some other club if that is what you really want) and Matches. Set the quality as high as possible in the web player. Pick a match and play it.
URL Snooper will have picked up all the media links that the browser made requests for:
At this point it helps to know that BigPond has a lot of servers and uses a sort of alias system to direct requests to them. The bptvvod.ngcdn.telstra.com server name seems to be an umbrella that resolves to all the other alternatives, or at least it has so far. We might then guess that we could ignore the server name and just change the rtsp:// part of the stream URL to http://, and sure enough the following procedure has proven to be reliable:
- Play the game, snoop its rstp URL
- Edit this url so it starts with http:// instead of rstp://.
How to record the stream.
Here is where we use VLC. Get it from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ (if you don't have it already) and fire it up.
Click the Media menu and select Open Network Stream...
Paste in your edited (http://) game URL and click the little down arrow to the right of the Play button:
Write in a destination file name ending in .mp4. Optionally check the Display the output box.
Click Start. You are up and running.
The recording runs in real time, so a 3-hour video will take 3 hours to record. On the other hand if you have a good internet connection you can start several instances of VLC and record several games at once.
Update: A problem with VLC 2.0?
For Bombers Fans
Friendly sandbelt has constructed lists of URLs of essendon games for the two years that this video format was current for. Some browsers (for me, only Internet Explorer 9) allow you to check them out directly by clicking the links. But you can always right-click the link, choose Copy, and then paste into VLC to make a recording.
2009
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2008
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The final post in this series, when I write it, will be about how to record the videos from 2007. This will be getting very much into the land of diminishing returns since their quality is so low, but never mind, completeness is a virtue all in itself.
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