HDS Link Detector 0.6, Win x64 8.1SP1, FF 32.0.3 - no streams detected - req help

[FredThompson]

System:

Win 8.1 SP1 x64
Firefox 32.0.3
clean profile with ONLY HDS Link Detector 0.6

ustream.tv as played through creativelive.com is apparently not detected.

I have HDS Link Detector 0.6 enabled but there is no pop-up displaying any paths.

creativelive.com streams are through these URLs (not all of them are active all the time.)

https://www.creativelive.com/live1
https://www.creativelive.com/live2
https://www.creativelive.com/live3
https://www.creativelive.com/watch4
https://www.creativelive.com/watch1
https://www.creativelive.com/watch2
https://www.creativelive.com/watch3
https://www.creativelive.com/watch4
https://www.creativelive.com/watch5
https://www.creativelive.com/watch6
https://www.creativelive.com/watch7
https://www.creativelive.com/watch8
https://www.creativelive.com/watch9

Any help is appreciated.

Ultimately, I'd love to have a way to set the URL to be monitored as well as start/stop times and have the whole thing run through hdsdump or AdobeHDS. Don't know of that is possible with a Greasemonkey script...

[blimey]

The ustream links do work. For example, h..ps://www.creativelive.com/watch4 is currently using h..ps://www.ustream.tv/embed/3696988 - which can be used with livestreamer. Or use ffmpeg with the corresponding hls url.

[FredThompson]

Thanks for your prompt reply.

Would you please explain, or point me to and explanation of, how this would be done. I'll search for instructions now.

I'm not stupid, just ignorant.

-- edit --

OK, I just read about Livestreamer. Looks helpful.

As I understand it, Livestreamer can be used to cut through the intermediary junk and deliver a clean stream. The page mentions going through VLC which would also give a way to do a capture of the decoded stream, correct?

A few days ago one of the KISS capture routines like Jaksta grabbed a series of small decoded FLVs. I'm still trying to figure out how I did it. It might have been Win 8.1 x64 before SP1 was added. Something like that would be great as it would give the closest option to pure source. AdobeHDS could be used to join them. Is this possible?

[FredThompson]

ok, thought about this some more.

Assuming livestreamer->VLC is roughly analagous to analog video capture, VLC should save each frame if the supporting computer/software are fast enough. From what I've seen, video from CreativeLive is 480p widescreen (true widescreen, not stretched pixels) so modern computers should be just fine with a fast lossless codec like ut. A decent deblocking filter and an anti-aliased text logo overlay on the bottom gray bar to include the particular video's title could be run through a decent encoder easily enough. These streams are rather blocky.

I had discovered the ustream.tv link, too, by looking at watch4's html. Maybe a vcr, of sorts, could be made to retrieve the html file, parse it to get the specific ustream url which would then be fed to VLC. Should be easy enough to do this with a scripting language like AutoIt. I don't know much about VLC yet. Maybe it can be called by command line or passed paramters. In that case, a simple text file which is a table of channel (live1, watch4, etc.), start time, stop time, destinationfilename could be used.

Pro: easy to code
Pro: livestreamer is a specialized tool with active development
Con: re-encoding is costly, even if using mjpeg, so multiple simultaneous streams might be a problem
Con: No way to know which channel it use. Might need a more powerful scripting method to dive a browser. CreativeLive has a stupid drop-down menu to display the running streams. Don't particularly want to code a screen scraper.
Pro/Con: Might be most universal to write a Greasemonkey script to grab the particular details.

[blimey]

Livestreamer is a downloader. It needn't pass to vlc or do any transcoding. On the command line, execute;

livestreamer -o "3696988.flv" "https://www.ustream.tv/embed/3696988" best

which will download the 720p quality of the video off the server and write it to a file named "3696988.flv". Leave off "best" for a listing of the other qualities available (on the server) for the video.

[FredThompson]

Tested livestreamer. Works great. Love the settings and multiple thread support. Thanks for the suggestion.