How can I download these streaming archived shows?

January 13, 2012 2:47 AM

Years ago I watched this sci-fi interview show called Prisoners of Gravity. I couldn't find any episodes for many years, but recently I discovered they were archived on the internet! Now I want to download them so I will never be without them ever again, but the site is giving me difficulties.

I tried Keepvid and DownloadHelper but they don't seem to work. I could use Camtasia or some other screen capture recording program, but that, as you can imagine, will take forever. I'm hoping that someone with more html and .flv streaming knowledge will be able to offer me a solution. Thanks in advance.

Here is the site:
http://archive.tvo.org/program/119701

PS. For sci-fi book fans, give these a listen. Most of the episodes involve interviews and conversations with sci-fi authors based upon specific themes. Quite enjoyable.

posted by Sully to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Avast is giving me a malware warning at that site. I don't know if that's a known issue (false positive) or if that's part of your problem.
posted by Trexsock at 3:43 AM on January 13, 2012

TVO = TeleVision Ontario, a public broadcaster funded by the government of Ontario. It is possible there is malware on their site due to a virus but most likely that is a false positive. The shows have complicated copyright (interviewee's permission was only granted for broadcast, not re-release) and it is unlikely to be released on DVD any time soon. The copyright however, remains with TVO and they do not permit downloading of the episodes at this time. Master Copies of the much of the show are available at the Toronto Public Library as part of their reference collection.

You may enjoy this thread.
posted by saucysault at 5:47 AM on January 13, 2012

I'm on a linux system here, the command line utility get_flash_videos (works on linux/osx) (using rtmpdump) appears to have let me save the Virtual Reality episode. It looks like a valid flash media file, however I did this on my home machine from work, so I can't actually see if the video/audio is all right.

Since rtmpdump is part of mplayer, you might be able to run mplayer (works on a lot of systems) from whatever system you have with the "-dumpstream" option after you dig out the brightcove.com link ; which is the source of the streaming.
posted by nobeagle at 8:32 AM on January 13, 2012 [2 favorites]