[Long Shot] Capturing F4F flash streaming

[GreenGoo]

My wife purchased a live stream of a concert. It is available for 4 days (36 hours left) then goes poof. I'd like to save it to file, but there are some snags above and beyond your typical youtube grab.

Yes, I'm technically pirating it. No, I don't care. It was expensive and the time limit is bullshit.

The server requires authentication. It is handled through a web session with a simple userid and password.

Second, it's chunked streaming. In this case, F4F format. A quick explanation is that the stream is a series of tiny files. It's also called "Adaptive Streaming" or "Dynamic Streaming" because the resolution of each file changes based on your bandwidth limitations. If you ask for HD but the connection detects a fluctuation in your available speed, it will downgrade to match the speed, and when it speeds up again, the files will switch back to higher rez.

So essentially I need something that will capture a billion little files from an authentication required server.

Things like Downthemall is great, except it wants to connect to the server directly and the server refuses anonymous connections. There is no way to provide authentication through Downthemall as far as I know.

I've also tried Video downloadhelper, but it seems to be confused by the F4F format.

I did find one firefox plugin that worked. Sort of. Although I can't recall the name of it off hand (it's at home). It downloaded the files as the player loaded them (including caching) which was nice. Unfortunately it just stops working after about 400-700 files. I haven't had a chance to combine them yet to see how long the video is from 700 files. I'll check tonight. In any case I'm trying to download 4 hours of video, and I'm guessing 700 files is probably less than 1 hour.

The files come down sequentially (which is good) but have an .undefined extension (which is bad, but not the end of the world).

Someone has written a php script to combine the chunks into a single flash file, which is awesome. I'll have to bulk rename thousands of files on windows, which is probably not bad (but it would be super easy on Linux).

Long story short, I'm almost there, but not quite, and the result will be "ok" but not great. If the server accepted anonymous connections this would be a piece of cake.

Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? I have little knowledge of video so I'm learning as I go.

edit: If it helps, the site uses jwplayer to play the stream.

[hitbyambulance]

can you try using authentication modes on cURL or wget (on Linux)?

if you couldn't get anything else to work, alternative is to run a screen video capture while playing in the middle of the night (for best bandwidth and quality).

[gilraen]

if you couldn't get anything else to work, alternative is to run a screen video capture while playing in the middle of the night (for best bandwidth and quality).

Streaming screen capture is what I was going to suggest. If you google "record DRM protected video streams" you'll get lots of suggestions for free programs to use.

[GreenGoo]

Thanks guys. I did get it working sort of, but after the first 3 or 4 minutes of (reconstructed .flv) video it was corrupted and only the audio survived. Someone eventually put it on youtube so they solved the problem for me.

Meh.