The subject of this blog is: can I download these videos to my computer so I can save them in my home entertainment system and watch them on my TV?
What's on offer.
All games from last year (2010) up to the present are stored on the BigPond servers as mp4 files with resolutions of 720x400 and video data rates of 2051 kbps, and they look quite respectable on a big screen. Furthermore they are easy to download - all it takes is a right-click in a browser, provided you have the links, which I can provide. They amount to a little under a gigabyte per hour in terms of file size.
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.
The games from 2007 are barely watchable except on a smartphone or iPod: resolution is poor (352 x 288) and the data rate is down to 1.19 mbps. They are also Windows Media rtsp streams with all the problems that come with that format.
There is nothing much before 2007.
Who might want to read more.
- Essendon fans who want to build up a video archive of past games. I have done most of the work for you already.
- Followers of any other team who want to build up a video archive of past games. There may be more for you to do, but I can show you how to go about it.
The way ahead.
The next several posts in this series will have to do with
- listing the video links from 2010 up to the present
- downloading these files
- discovering the video links from earlier games
- downloading these earlier games
Some of the instructions will be Microsoft-Windows-only, but most of them will work equally well in Linux or on an Apple.
This blog is being written in 2011 and there is no knowing what BigPond might do in 2012
This blog is being written in 2011 and there is no knowing what BigPond might do in 2012
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