How to use iView (ABC Australia) downloaders

[BNW]

I've never been able to get iviewripper working on my main pc .. it can't d/l the ep database. BUT .. I installed sbsripper and it works fine on the same pc that iviewripper constantly fails. Anyone make sense of this? M3M1E?

[m4rk01]

Originally Posted by BNW

... SBSNapper did fall over occasionally in the past ... Dunno if it's the case this time?

Originally Posted by gxdata

re SBSRipper - yes, it is broken. See post at Whirlpool.

Over here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum...t=2320227&p=16

[gxdata]

Originally Posted by BNW

I've never been able to get iviewripper working on my main pc .. it can't d/l the ep database. BUT .. I installed sbsripper and it works fine on the same pc that iviewripper constantly fails. Anyone make sense of this? M3M1E?

The 'Rippers use different download 'helpers' - ffmpeg, and wget. You can see those .exe files if you look in the respective
C:\Program Files (x86)\
folders for SBSRipper and iViewRipper.

So, there is a strong possibility that another installed application makes use of (guessing) ffmpeg and this "interferes" with how 'Ripper needs to.

Just how, I don't know; but you did find that iViewRipper does work on another PC than your "main" one.

[BNW]

Originally Posted by gxdata

The 'Rippers use different download 'helpers' - ffmpeg, and wget... So, there is a strong possibility that another installed application makes use of (guessing) ffmpeg and this "interferes" with how 'Ripper needs to...

I never looked under the hood .. I just assumed they used the same downloaders .. but that makes sense. As for the clash .. the only thing that jumps out at me is that I have a Hauppauge tv card which has a tsr component that loads up on boot. Otherwise I try to run a lean system. But .. the Hauppauge software doesn't use ffmpeg AFAIK.

Mind you, it's NOT downloading the video that fails but the xml file .. and the old napper still happily dls the xml file.

Oh well .. life wasn't meant to be easy.

[m4rk01]

Originally Posted by Yansky

... Greasemonkey userscript for grabbing the video download on iView

I'm guessing this ffmpeg tool no longer works. Anyone tried it recently?

[gxdata]

General observation - NOT a criticism of M3M1E:

I guess I shouldn't complain, but there is an inherent problem in iViewRipper not using rtmpdump (and SBSRipper not using RTFLV = the python parallel downloader's method, with a modified URL) in that resume isn't possible.

This is a real problem for those unfortunates with a flaky internet connection.

Though my connection is not great, just OK - at best 6Mbps (download speed 750 KB/s) - I have had a couple of weeks of problems due to one or all of: faulty modem, faulty filter/splitter, faults on the copper line, or my ISP.

If there is no connection, the 'Rippers don't work (no warning messages); if connection is lost, the spawned download processes just stall, and when the internet connection is resumed (with/without modem restart), seldom do the download(s) succeed.

Cancelling the individual processes (or the entire 'Ripper parent process) will delete the downloaded MP4 fragment (or a successful download - I have checked, by making a copy of MP4 and playing*).

* otherwise it's hard to know if a 'saved' file is complete or not

Under perfect internet connection situation, it is fatal to download a show again: the existing MP4 file with identical name (successfully DL previously) will be deleted, and a new DL begun. With rtmpdump (iView or SBS), or RTFLV (SBS) the 'resume' parameter ensured this wasted time/effort/quota didn't happen. I thought that this was so with curl.exe as well (? continue at offset).

There are a few other unresolved problems. It's not a good idea to be greedy, selecting several shows to download at once or more than one very large show (on iView, because of the very modest bitrate of all shows, that means something over an hour or two of air play time).

On SBS, where the SBSRipper uses a high bitrate by default (and no other option), this is a big problem - everything one chooses to download is large. I sometimes like to check SBS News, which I could tolerate at a 512K bitrate (and get 1500K later, if it was really desirable to get a good view).

As I stated at the top, this is not a criticism of M3M1E, who has generously devoted a lot of time to the only tools we have.

But I would like to see some improvements, because many of the problems outlined above affect exactly those who find that they can't use the iView player or SBS On Demand - those with bloody awful internet connections.

[Jamesboy70]

As I said before for ABC I use IDM (internet download manager) for all my downloads in Iview using Firefox and the idm plugin . Start iview find the file that you want click on it to start it to play a box will come up on the top right hand side click on the green arrow a list of various file sizes will drop down chose which you want it will download fast you can pause the playing file if you want to as the downloaded file will be a flash file convert with your favorite converter this works with SBS iview as well but not the encrypted type

[BNW]

Been quiet here .... v2.13 finally works on my system - thanks M3M1E. However ... I assume it should be possible to convert a downloaded xml file into the dat file that v2.13 requires. Any suggestions? I'm not on FB so I can't post this to M3M1Es ripper page.

[gxdata]

Originally Posted by BNW

Been quiet here .... v2.13 finally works on my system - thanks M3M1E. However ... I assume it should be possible to convert a downloaded xml file into the dat file that v2.13 requires. Any suggestions? I'm not on FB so I can't post this to M3M1Es ripper page.

Glad you're having success. Did you find out what the difference between machines was, that caused the one to never work with a 'Ripper until v2.13?

It would be useful to have the 'Ripper "DB" (.dat) file as its raw xml instead of a binary version.

But I wonder if a saved .dat could be used like we used to manually alter input to Yansky's (I think) batch file, to get "expired" shows - like yesterday's WA news, for example.

There are several iView programs, mainly news factual, that have a residence time of a day, and sometimes appear for very much less than 24 hours.

I must try...

[BNW]

Never could work out what the issue was .. gave up in the end. The xml/browser method, whilst messy, works fine.