RTMP streaming from videolectures.net - lmmx/devnotes GitHub Wiki

Son Hua noted that an RTMP address for videolectures.net videos is Streaming URL = clip.netConnectionUrl + sub_folder + clip.url. These seem to have been removed from the source code for the page, but:

  1. Redirect all RTMP traffic: sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -j REDIRECT
  2. Start rtmsrv & keep it running. sudo rtmpsrv
  3. Go to the browser tab and open/refresh the page which streams the video you intend to download and click on Play (if the video doesn't automatically starts streaming).

Ideally, the video shouldn't play because rtmpsrv should've redirected the traffic. If youre getting a vlack screen instead of the video, you're good to proceed.

Go and have a look at the terminal -- you should see some text being printed. Copy the command which starts with rtmpdump ... You should now stop the rtmsrv by pressing Ctrl+C on the same terminal. 4. You must undo the iptable redirect by executing the following command. sudo iptables -t nat -D OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -j REDIRECT 5. Now just paste the command you copied in Step 3 above onto your terminal and it should start downloading the video.

Re: that last point, VLC can also take the command so rather than fiddling with local files written from the command line you can just give this network stream.

  • Note that the flv address will end in .flv, which should be dropped when appending to clip.netConnectionUrl + sub_folder to make the RTMP address to enter in VLC

For David MacKay's Gaussian Process Basics, the address for VLC is rtmp://oxy.videolectures.net/video/gpip06_mackay_gpb/flv:v000/a7/u7mevpiqbufsbd2g7yglhtyjymodckhh

Update: 2021

Looks like youtube-dl has videolectures.net covered (playlists too!), no longer RTMP but SMIL (XML spec for presentations)

If you really wanted to you can just look in its repo and reimplement the relevant parts (see this commit in particular)

I just tried the following and got a complementary MP3 with my flv:

youtube-dl is capable (2017-10) of extracting this video. The RTMP links appear to be down.

The 'medium bandwidth' .flv stream appears to end up with the best quality (VP6 Flash codec), 320x240:

youtube-dl -v -xk -f http-415 "http://videolectures.net/gpip06_mackay_gpb/"

List available formats with: youtube-dl -v -F "http://videolectures.net/gpip06_mackay_gpb/"