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Showing posts from September, 2013

downloading protected/embedded videos - the hard way

Charged with the task to save a news broadcast for posteriority, I wanted to download a video that was only available through an embedded "JW Player" videoplayer on a website. Time was not on my side: the video would be purged from the site within a week. In the HTML source of the webpage containing the video, I found tags like data-video-src =" http://media. XYZ nieuws.net/GEO2013/09/230916509ONL1309244843676.GeoFLVLong.flv " data-video-iphone-path =" GEO2013/09/230916509ONL1309244843676.GeoMP4_H.264.m4v or (from another video) data-video-rtmp-path =" 2009/11/132628352ONL0911177754876.urlFLVLong.flv " but I couldn't get a clear URL out of the page's source code (URLs anonymized to protect involved parties). After a bit of research (a.o. channeling browser traffic through a proxy and looking at the URLs being requested), the files used by the JW Player were still a mystery to me, but I found the server that was hosting the iphone