Downloading Podcast?

Thu Jan 11 04:24:18 PST 2018

From: Rochford, Steve
Sent: Thursday, January 4, 2018 3:43 PM

>>>What's harder (impossible?) to see is whether the server might have
>>>offered you a Flash video in other circumstances but has chosen to send
>>>you an HTML5 one because it thinks that suits your browser/platform
>>>better.

>>That is where my knowledge breaks down.  I have no idea what the code to 
>>decide whether to offer Flash or HTML5 looks like.

>From my limited experience, the webserver is going to look at the user 
>agent string. If you send a string which identifies your browser as one 
>which can render HTML5 then that's >what you'll get including in-line 
>video; if your browser is identified as an older browser which can't cope 
>with HTML5 then you'll get (eg) Flash video.

My user agent string seems to be

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 
Firefox/57.0

It is not obvious from that string that the browser supports HTML5, so there 
must be some sort of lookup table.  I have now found what HTML5 video should 
look like.

<video width="320" height="240" controls>
  <source src="movie.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  <source src="movie.ogg" type="video/ogg">
Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

The text is only displayed if the browser does not support the <video ...> 
element.
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_video.asp

As of yesterday, video clips in The Times now play in Firefox.  It would 
have been interesting to compare the working version with the old.  I have 
searched the page for <video and <source, but they are probably behind the 
paywall.

As for Alastair's clip, the consensus seems to be that it is returning Flash 
because Flash is the only type the clip supports.  Is it correct for the 
page to begin with a
<!DOCTYPE html>
tag if it does not support HTML5 video?

On a slightly different note, to avoid confusion to anyone reading the 
archive I ought to qualify the suggestions I made earlier in the thread.

1.  I suggested using the Convert/Save function of VLC.  At that time I had 
not tried it.  When I did I could not get it to work.  It seems VLC needs 
additional help to play RTMP streaming.

https://msankhala.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/save-flash-player-video-rtmp-streaming-with-vlc-player/

I have not tried what is suggested in that blog because it seems a lot of 
work and

2.  I successfully downloaded Alastair's clip by restoring rtmpdump.exe to 
the utils directory and running get_iplayer v2.99 with --tvmode flashvhigh.

Bet wishes
Richard