Help me figure out how to watch flash videos from this colonial archive!

April 8, 2022 9:59 AM

For quite a while, I've used the Colonial Film Archive (http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/home) to watch historical footage related to the British empire. However, because the site relies substantially on Flash, many of the videos are now unviewable. I can't event seem to find a way to download the Flash video files. I wonder if anyone has ideas on how I can watch or export videos on this site?
posted by johnasdf to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

You might be able to view the content in a Flash emulator. A good place to start search is the Internet Archive, also home to the Wayback Machine.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:29 AM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

The site code references an RTMP server that would be serving the video via a flash applet. But that URL (s3fh01uat1j3i.cloudfront.net) seems to be defunct (it doesn't have any associated DNS records), so even with a working Flash plugin, I suspect the videos would still not work.

If the server was somehow still online, there are reimplementations of the RTMP protocol that would have a chance of being able to play the videos, but it seems like the server has fallen off the internet.

Because these videos were being served with a proprietary server protocol, I don't think the IA would have been able to grab it without special effort, and at least there's no evidence of it on the archived pages, which also don't show the videos.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:33 AM on April 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

A lot of this project has linkrotted away. The "contact us" page references "http://www.empiremuseum.co.uk/" and "http://imagesofempire.com/", neither of which exist anymore.

Unfortunately your best bet might be to contact people involved in the project and ask them.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:42 AM on April 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

This Flash emulator? Ruffle
posted by brainwane at 12:22 PM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ruffle fails to load the video player on the site at all, because it's using Actionscript 3, and Ruffle doesn't support that yet.

Ruffle doesn't support RTMP anyway, and probably(?) can't support it in the browser. Even if it did, it would need the RTMP server to come back online. If the RTMP server was still around there are tools to dump the video without needing a whole Flash plugin, but without the server there's nothing to dump...
posted by BungaDunga at 12:48 PM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Okay, I knew you all would have an amazing technical analysis of this situation! Let me check out the Wayback links and email the project directors!
posted by johnasdf at 3:18 PM on April 8, 2022

VLC and MPC-HC both claims to be able to play back RTMP streams if you got the full URL. And you can definitely transcode / save to disk with VLC. So I believe the problem is the actual server had linkrotted away.

Gnash itself seems to have kinda died as of 2010.
posted by kschang at 8:00 PM on April 8, 2022

I tried this with yt-dlp (a youtube-dl fork) with a random video and it can't find the source video. Looks like linkrot to me:

$ yt-dlp -v http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/751
[debug] Command-line config: ['-v', 'http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/751']
[debug] User config "/home/neckro/.config/yt-dlp/config": ['--compat-options', 'filename,format-sort,abort-on-error,no-live-chat', '--write-info-json', '--sub-langs', 'all', '--write-subs', '--convert-subs', 'srt', '--embed-subs', '--embed-metadata']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out utf-8, err utf-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] yt-dlp version 2022.04.08 [7884ade65] (zip)
[debug] Compatibility options: format-sort, no-live-chat, filename, abort-on-error
[debug] Python version 3.8.10 (CPython 64bit) - Linux-5.4.0-100-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.29
[debug] Checking exe version: ffmpeg -bsfs
[debug] Checking exe version: ffprobe -bsfs
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 4.2.4, ffprobe 4.2.4
[debug] Optional libraries: certifi, Crypto, secretstorage, sqlite
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[debug] [generic] Extracting URL: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/751
[generic] 751: Requesting header
WARNING: [generic] Falling back on generic information extractor.
[generic] 751: Downloading webpage
[generic] 751: Extracting information
[debug] Looking for video embeds
[debug] Sort order given by user: hasaud, lang, quality, tbr, filesize, vbr, height, width, proto, vext, abr, aext, fps, fs_approx, source, id
[debug] Formats sorted by: hasvid, ie_pref, hasaud, lang, quality, tbr, filesize, vbr, height, width, proto, vext, abr, aext, fps, fs_approx, source, id, res, hdr:12(7), vcodec:vp9.2(10), acodec, asr
[debug] Identified a JW Player data
[debug] Default format spec: bestvideo*+bestaudio/best
[info] 751: Downloading 1 format(s): 0
[info] Writing video metadata as JSON to: CARIBBEAN _ colonialfilm-751.info.json
[SubtitlesConvertor] There aren't any subtitles to convert
[debug] Invoking downloader on "http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1574843A_st-vp6-std-v1.flv"
ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 404: Not Found
posted by neckro23 at 7:51 AM on April 11, 2022 [1 favorite]