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Livestream.com seems to be using flash player to show both live streams and archived/recorded streams (meaning previously shown streams). I want to download the archived streams. I am assuming that it should be much easier to download archived video from the website compared to the live stream.

Here is a sample video:

http://www.livestream.com/copanamericana/video?clipId=pla_6f9f4d97-e48f-4b04-bcaa-18e281341b0f&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb

(I am not interested in this particular video, it's just an example.)

Firefox plugins like DownloadHelper and all do not work. Any suggestions?

If I look at the browsing cache, no matter what the website plays, all files have the same size! If I open them, of course no video gets played. So something clever/funny is going on with the flash player on livestream.com (yes, even the archives videos), so it is definitely not the same as downloading videos from youtube. However, ads played on livestream.com videos are properly stored in browser cache.

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  • can you re-open this question? The thread you pointed me towards is 2 years old! None of the suggestions work for livestream.com except capturing the screen itself, which is not really a solution.
    – TPR
    Jul 5, 2011 at 18:54
  • So the tips about checking the cache are a no go?
    – random
    Jul 5, 2011 at 19:02
  • @random I edited my question to include the situation about cache.
    – TPR
    Jul 5, 2011 at 19:05
  • Do these help at all? superuser.com/questions/115216/…
    – random
    Jul 5, 2011 at 19:39
  • Sounds like Hulu, which uses HTTP to transfer their ads but RTSP to transfer the actual programming. RTSP is harder to intercept. You might look at Orbit Downloader, which can download some things that Video Download Helper (for instance) can't.
    – CarlF
    Jul 5, 2011 at 20:05

4 Answers 4

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If you're using Firefox 4 or later, the newest Video Download Helper claims to capture any video stream using video capture. Not as slick as downloading but it would presumably work. (They're actually just calling an external vidcap program.)

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I run firefox 24 on my gentoo and use Ant Video Downloader to download flashvideos from about any site you could imagine. Moste video downloaders have trouble with other sites than youtube. You can finde it on the regular Firefox Addons Page, here. Its very simplistic but works good.

Edit 09.08.14: Ok just tested it and it did not work on the livestream website. I think the reason is that the server does not serve some sort of fixed package of data in the sense of .flv file. It is more sort of a endless river of images, that keeps pouring in. The tools I have test so far on this website all are all unable to open a download. Or the somehow managed to block download tools.

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  1. Download youtube-dl a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.

  2. Download rtmpdump and unpack zip(ex. rtmpdump-2.4-git-010913-windows.zip) toolkit for RTMP streams.

  3. Move youtube-dl.exe and rtmpdump.exe into a single directory.

    Usage instructions are easy. Use youtube-dl followed by a video URL or identifier.

Example how run it from the command line:

youtube-dl "http://www.livestream.com/islapbabies/video?clipId=pla_bcac91a6-5bb8-4a22-ac2a-f1e85cabbcb5&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb"

Better create .bat in directory where contains youtube-dl.exe and rtmpdump.exe for continue usage.

In example size of video 70mb.

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  • Many archived videos i cant watch even with browser. At some point video reset to 00:00 and button replay shown. youtube-dl also will stop download at this point too. Aug 9, 2014 at 14:24
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You can downloads clips from specific sites (such as Youtube) on keepvid.com (there are a few other such sites.)

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