Sunday 1 May 2011

get-flash-videos and osx (off topic)

I travel a lot and want to watch tv shows from the UK while I am doing so. There is get_iplayer that works nicely to get BBC shows, but on occasion there are things on itv (!) I watch. For this I use 'get-flash-videos'.

I had a tough time getting this working on OSX, so in a nutshell here is what I did:

1) Get 'get-flash-videos'
The home page is here. You pull that down somewhere onto your mac (I have it in a Downloads/get-flash-videos directory).

2) Update perl!
This is the key! I know nothing about perl, but here is what I did:
perl -MCPAN -e shell

This brings up a perl shell. Perl seems to have a package manager called CPAN. You will need to update this:
install Bundle::CPAN


Then you need to install Digest:SHA and Compress:ZLIB:
install Digest::SHA1
install Compress::Zlib


3) FLVStreamer and rtmpdump
Installing FLVStreamer is non-trivial and there are other guides about that.
I download rtmpdump from here
Then
chmod +x rtmpdump
sudo cp rtmpdump /usr/local/bin/.


4) Grab video!
now you should be able to do something like:
./get_flash_videos http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=228293

And have it pull down an mp4. I use Handbrake to convert it for playing on the ipad.

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