Winter Olympics live stream recording

[Paul Phillips]

thanks very much for your help again. I will try the new head now.

For anyone else keeping track I'll give my synopsis so far:
(a) It's definitely possible to record the live BBC HD streams from
the Winter Olympics

(b) Picture quality is excellent. Not true HD bitrates, but very good
nevertheless (eg much better than red button on my tv)

(c) There are two methods in this thread to capture the recordings, both
sometimes work, but not all the time.

Method 1 tries to pick up the stream from the player page direct from the
BBC sport website using a revised head code. It's 50/50 in my experience
that you'll get the right recording at the end though based on my
experience (at the time of writing I haven't tested the very latest code
from dinkypumpkin).  The code is in the HEAD page here
  https://github.com/dinkypumpkin/get_iplayer/wiki/installation

Method 2 is a bit more work for you upfront at the start but I'd say it has
an 80% success rate. The only failures I get with this approach are when
the stream croaks due to internet connection (I assume) and it dumps early
missing the end.
- this is a special "olympics" branch version of get_iplayer with
playlistURLs picked out of
Firefox web console or similar.  instructions here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/get_iplayer@lists.infradead.org/msg05225.html

On 12 February 2014 14:59, dinkypumpkin <dinkypumpkin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/02/2014 20:55, Paul Phillips wrote:
>>
>> I think the latest Git Head is picking up the live stream from the
>> player page but something wierd is happening at the end when the
>> stream finishes.  That's my hunch.  The player pages seem to have
>> things feeding into them - eg the main channel sometimes feeds into
>> them. It's as if they are channels in their own right with different
>> feeds going into them
>
>
> Seems plausible, but I've no real idea.  It still seems strange that a
> static resource like one of the event guides would overwrite a live stream.
> I don't understand how an output file would be overwritten at all unless
> they're monkeying with the streams and rtmpdump gets confused.  It's
> impossible to tell from the log what is going on.
>
> I've made another change to HEAD that refreshes the values of <dldate> and
> <dltime> for each download attempt for a live stream.  Those two parameters
> are in the default value of <fileprefix> for live streams, so the effect
> would be to create a new output file every time rtmpdump croaks and
> get_iplayer restarts the download. That should probably be in get_iplayer
> anyway. I don't know if it will completely prevent files being overwritten
> on your machine, but give it a try if you're feeling brave.
>
> Another approach would be to choose a single CDN and quality (e.g.,
> --modes=flashhd1) and --retries=1 to prevent additional download attempts if
> rtmpdump croaks.  But if it chokes in the middle of the event, that will be
> the end of the recording.
>
> Anyway, I'm throwing in the towel on this.  I'll leave the changes in HEAD
> until the Olympics are over, though.  As you said, you can still use the
> "olympics" branch version of get_iplayer with playlist URLs picked out of
> Firefox web console or similar.  For anyone keeping score, that means you
> can fall back to the earlier instructions here:
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/get_iplayer@lists.infradead.org/msg05225.html
>
>
>
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-- 
Paul Phillips