SRF.ch — käspi

SRF.ch
======

This extension simply extracts the URLs of the video- and audio-files on the SRF (Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, Swiss german national television and radio) and the predecessor webpage www.sf.tv, and the RSI (Radiotelevisione Svizzera, Swiss italian national television and radio) webpage. The URLs are displayed partly after a right-click on a video or audio link on www.srf.ch and www.rsi.ch. On www.srf.ch video player pages there's additionally a link introduced just above the Flash player area which allows a right-click. They appear under the 'SRF URLs' context-menu entry. Sometimes it takes a few moments to extract the URLs.

Some of the content on the webpage is geo-blocked. This means that the URLs can't be extracted. After some timeout an empty context menu entry results. Other content is time blocked, meaning that the media file is only available over a fixed time-window. This is particularly the case for Tatort, Spielfilm and DOK videos. But those videos are only blocked on the SRF.ch webpage, but not on the RTMP streaming server. Therefore this add-on tries to guess the URLs of blocked videos of these types. All URLs which have been guessed are indicated with a leading asterisk (*). Their download might fail...

Starting with version 1.1.5 the add-on extracts the URLs of the M3U playlists. These entries show up with their M3U description in the context menu rather than the RTMP URL like the other entries. They can be helpful because M3U playlists are often available even if the stream is geo- or time-blocked. A windows shell script for downloading a video file available as M3U playlist is given further below.

Instruction on how to use the extracted URLs (with Open Source software, for links see below):
The media files can (only?) be transfered via the RTMP protocol. Flash players have it included, as well as the players on the web-page of SRF - of course. Nevertheless the files can be downloaded with the FLVstreamer software (see details below). Shell scripts for the download on Linux and Windows can found further below. Note that for videos which seem to be available as medium and low quality, i.e. "MQ" and "LQ", you could try to download the file in high quality as well. Just replace "mq1" or "lq1" in the URL by "hq1".

Media files for which M3U playlists are available can be directly played with VLC or any other player understanding the M3U format. To download such files on Windows there's a VB script below to do so. Any implementation for other operating systems or any improvements for the scripts are highly appreciated! Furthermore, avconv is very useful to download any kind of stream, using the following command

avconv -i <url> -codec copy <outputfile> (thanks to flip)


The downloaded files can be played with
* Video:
most (if not all!?) video files are of the format H264 with MPEG AAC audio. They can be viewed with the VLC player.
* Audio:
the audio files are of MPEG audio format (not mp3!). They can also be played with VLC.

Helpful software:
VLC player - http://www.videolan.org/vlc
FLVstreamer - http://www.nongnu.org/flvstreamer
avconv - http://www.libav.org/avconv.html


Thanks to a hint from a user, the following command could be used to download an M3U file on Linux:
wget -qO - `wget -qO - <url>`

Or - as said above - using avconv:
avconv -i <url> -codec copy <outputfile>

-Kaspar Giger <sftv@kgmw.ch>