For those that don’t read my Twitter/Identi.ca stream, I’ve been writing an application, which I have neglected to name anything, so let’s call it Python-iView.
It’s a Python-based frontend to ABC iView, which if you’ve been living under a rock, is an awesome ABC TV programme catchup service that lets you watch most ABC programs from the last month in your browser. Not only that, but our ISP, Internode, has unmetered the service so it doesn’t use up our download quota.
However, it has some major problems:
- It depends on the use of the Adobe Flash plugin, which is proprietary software, which means that only changes or fixes for bugs in the plugin that Adobe approve of can be applied.
- Flash only runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and x86 (32-bit or 64-bit) Linux. (e.g. our 1GHz Apple eMac running Linux has a PowerPC processor, which Adobe have chosen not to support, and thus cannot access iView, but would otherwise be powerful enough to play the videos.)
- The videos must be watched in the browser inside Flash, which is a lot of overhead compared to a simple media player like VLC. iView is too slow on older or less powerful computers. (e.g. iView is so slow it is unusable on my ASUS Eee PC 901, even though it internally only uses 640×480 FLV video which should in theory be playable by any computer made in the last 10 years.)
- Videos must be launched from within the web browser, and cannot be watched offline (e.g. downloading in advance for a long car trip). Though the ABC offers a download service for some of its programmes, it is not as comprehensive as the iView programme. Nor can videos be downloaded for the purposes of fair dealing (e.g. interoperability — see points about Flash being proprietary above).
- Not everyone has a fast Internet connection, and cannot watch the videos in real-time. You can get much smoother playback by downloading a video in advance and watching it once it is finished.
To address this, I wrote the open source (GPLv3) application Python-iView, which does two main things:
- Allows you to browse the iView programme outside of the browser (from a GTK+ interface).
- Allows you to download episodes to your hard drive in their original FLV format.
You can then play the resulting FLV files in a media player such as VLC or Totem. The ABC formats their video into a 16:9 ratio in a 640×480 resolution. Because of that, the video may appear squashed — make sure to select the 16:9 aspect ratio in your movie player to compensate.
To get this magic application for yourself, install the following:
- Bazaar (package bzr in Debian and Ubuntu)
- Python 2.6 (preinstalled on most Linux distributions)
- BeautifulSoup (package python-beautifulsoup in Debian and Ubuntu)
- rtmpdump
Then, run the following to download python-iview:
$ bzr branch http://dev.sunriseroad.net/bzr/jeremy/python-iview/ python-iview
You can then launch either iview-cli for a command-line interface, or iview-gtk for a graphical interface. See the included README file for further instructions and usage examples.
Because of this application, I am now able to browse and view iView programmes on my Eee PC, Apple eMac (PowerPC), play programmes on our TV (through our Xbox) instead of having to watch them on a computer screen, or watch programmes during car trips.
Very nice, be lovely to see this integrated into MythTV! :-)
Yeah. Like I mentioned above, I sometimes use this with XBMC (download videos on my PC and play it on the Xbox). It would be nice to have it integrated in XBMC itself too.
However, James Henstridge has written an iView plugin for Rygel — rygel-iview — which can already re-stream iView to UPnP capable video players (which apparently include the PlayStation 3). It would probably be easier to retrofit that to work with MythTV than my app.
I’ve got a basic XBMC plugin that I’ve been working on
http://www.andybotting.com/wordpress/using-abcs-iview-on-xbmc
Needs at least SVN rev 22434 for the RTMP to work properly though.
Hey, that totally rocks! Unfortunately, the XBMC on our Xbox is well over a year old, and we’re a little too scared to update it.
Maybe this will give us the incentive we need. :)
Nice, very nice.
Have been using the command line iview downloader but this is a big improvement.
Thanks.
Dr Who on my EEE PC — lovely.
Thanks
No worries. :)
I’m getting a 404 error in the python debug now.. Have ABC changed something?
The programme still works fine for me. Could you give me any specifics?
Its okey, I grabbed a fresh copy and it now gets all the information correctly, but when I try and download a show it starts the download but fails after about 30 seconds, this is the debug:
FLVStreamer: DEBUG: ReadN, RTMP socket closed by server
FLVStreamer: ERROR: ReadPacket, failed to read RTMP packet body. len: 64444
I hope that helps..
Unfortunately, I get that error too. Also unfortunately, it is beyond my control, as it appears to be a problem with FLVStreamer.
Maybe one of us should open a bug report with FLVStreamer.
Hi, this looks really useful. I have just got a new iMac (so OSX 10.6.1. Could you tell me what I’d need to install to get Python-iView to work on it. The prerequisites you quote look like they require Linux. Thanks.
Well if you could install Python 2.6, BeautifulSoup, and FLVStreamer, there’s a good chance the command-line client will work on OS X with no modification. Not tested myself, though — I only use Linux, although I don’t do anything intentionally platform specific.
[...] of my Python-iView application may have noticed that when attempting to watch videos, they cut out after [...]
[...] http://jeremy.visser.name/2009/08/30/python-iview/ a few seconds ago from Gwibber in context [...]
karmic x86 in EEEPC. Python 2.6.4
I have installed the pre-requisites via apt-get so they should be OK.
I can run the command “
iview-cli --print-auth” and getHowever when I run “iview-gtk” I get
Any pointers on what I have wrong please?
Many thanks
Ha ha — looks like the ABC turned off encryption on their index, because it was just so pathetic. :)
Quick fix: change
use_encryptiontoFalseiniview/config.py.[...] updated Python-iView to support the latest iView version, 316. To get the latest update, change to your python-iview [...]
Hi Jeremy,
Is it just me or does the new release (1.9) and modified release (1.6) of rtmp break python-ivew?
Works fine for me on both rtmpdump 1.6 and 1.9. What’s the error you get?
I’m getting the following error on Ubuntu 9.10 with Python 2.6.4, latest apt versions of bzr+python_beautifulsoup+rtmpdump 1.9:
Any ideas? I’ve only just stumbled on python-iview, so it hasn’t worked before for me…
Hi David,
I’ve been working on a fix for that today. Stay tuned. :)
David, last night, I pushed something that may have fixed your problem. Type
bzr pull, and see what happens.Hi Jeremy,
Nice work. I think I’ll have to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 to get it to work though (rtmpdump isn’t in the repositories for 9.04).
I’ve added Python-iView to the Whirlpool wiki: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=ABC_iView_Downloader
There’s also some technical info on that page that might help you.
Cheers,
Sridhar
Heh heh. Thanks for the support, although it was already added, under “Platform Independent”.
(And indeed, above, I have had a success story on Mac OS X, although I haven’t bothered to see if it works on Windows or not.)
Whoops :) I’ve fixed up that wiki page now.
Now all I have to do is upgrade to 9.10 :)
Uh, why 9.10? Works beautifully if you use 9.04. Plus, rtmpdump isn’t even in the repositories at all. You need to compile from source.
(You must be getting confused with FLVStreamer, which is packaged, but doesn’t support SWF verification.)
Very slick indeed!
Particularly like the ability to run multiple dls.
Gets .flv streams just fine, but the mp4s inside the .flv wrappers are fooling rtmpdump to think it’s all done at 13 bytes.
Shall toddle around to see if there’s a fix.
Well if you figure that out, help would be much appreciated. The ABC is transitioning to MP4 from what I gather.
Looks like the coders in this Whirlpool thread have latched onto the mp4s in their scripts
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1308436&p=20#r397
But I see upthread here that you’re already aware of their work.
Specifically one contributor claims to have done a python version of the batch script for getting mp4s.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1308436&p=23#r446
Now having found the Whirlpool thread, I may have a play around on a virtual XP with that interesting .NET version by mce. Looks nice and well-behaved from a first trial.
Good luck with your coding. I have other stuff on the boil and am not a fan of the abc’s content enough to spend more time here, but I’ll drop by next week if you like feedback.
fyi my test of your current v is on a karmic with no firewall and basic nat’ing. Have to go and get experience with ipv6 config now – - esp since the Node have set it up for us home networkers to use :-)
‘iview-cli -a’ is coming up clean now after the most recent update, but everything I download right now is zero bytes. Aaargh! Any ideas? If anyone has it working right now, could you pls point me to a file that you know downloads cleanly, just so I can check it’s not something wrong with my config? I’m on Ubuntu 9.10 with everything up to date.
Has anyone written up how the iView protocol works anywhere?
hey,
‘oh noes’
I’m currently shifting stuff around! Everything should be back to normal when I’m done, but for now, everything’s broken. Sorry about that!
grumble. how long! i want my ABC :)
Oh, that was an old error message that I put up in place of a 404. I changed the error message to a normal 404 now.
In other words, you did a boo-boo. :)
erm…
the programs required for it to work confuse me :X
I’ve installed Bazaar and Python 2.6 but don’t know how to install the others. I’ve got XP, what do i need to extract/ run?
thx
Sorry, I haven’t yet tested this program in Windows (I hardly ever use Windows these days, so there is no incentive for me to develop for it), so it would probably be non-trivial to get going. I recommend checking out this page for a Windows–based downloader.
‘platform independant’ Bah!
I don’t see any patches for fixes coming from you, sunshine.
Python is a platform-independent language. It’s just a matter of getting the knobs and twiddly bits set to what Windows expects.
Angus, you should be able to install Beautiful Soup via “easy_install” in Windows; from memory that’s how I did it some time back. Google for “Python easy_install Windows” to get the instructions for installing easy_install under Windows; it’s relatively straightforward, and from then on you should be able to use easy_install to install most of the major Python libraries via “easy_install libraryname” from the command line
Hi Jeremy
I have the same “0 length” problem as David. rtmpdump gets called with the various parameters set, and return code is zero, but no data written to the flv file. Also ubuntu 9.10, python 2.6.4, rtcmpdump 2.0, and latest iview via brz. Can email you strace output if you require.
(thanks) Steve
Hi Steve,
If you look in
iview/fetch.py, line 22, you’ll find a commented out'-V'parameter (verbose). Uncomment that, and you’ll get the full output to rtmpdump.Don’t forget, when you retry a stream, delete the old file, as rtmpdump is buggy and won’t resume the download properly (even if the file is 0 bytes long).
The problem is possibly that the stream you are trying to download is MP4. I don’t support that yet, but there is a workaround.
If the stream is not found (either because you are making a typo, or you are trying to download an MP4 video), then you may get this error (after you turn verbose output on):
Hi Jeremy,
Here’s the output: (I get the same result with the GUI too)
I trimmed your output for you — no need to worry. :)
And yes, it turns out you hit one of the dang MP4 videos. I got the same error, but was able to download it with this command instead:
$ ./iview-cli -d mp4:hopesprings_09_01_08And here’s a suggestion for you: don’t run any of this stuff as root. While my code is certainly not malicious, it doesn’t exactly need root privileges either. Much safer to run as a normal user. :)
Hi Jeremy,
Patrick (from SLUG)
Okay, thought I’d post here so others could gain something from my experience :))
I’m on Kubuntu 9.10 (previously during my travails I was using 8.04)
Installed FLVStreamer via repos.
Downloaded rtmpdump from:
http://lkcl.net/rtmp/
version 1.9
When I run:
$ make linux
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/patrick/applications/rtmpdump-1.9′
g++ -Wall bytes.o log.o rtmp.o AMFObject.o rtmppacket.o rtmpdump.o parseurl.o dh.o handshake.o -o rtmpdump -lcrypto
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/patrick/applications/rtmpdump-1.9′
I do not get a ‘rtmpdump_X86′ file, merely a ‘rtmpdump’ file.
I’ve copied that to /usr/local/sbin
This results when I run:
“./iview-cli –download hyperdrive_09_02_06
Starting rtmpdump…
RTMPDump v1.9
(c) 2009 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL
Connecting …”
and an empty file!
:)))
I know this is starting from the beginning again, but any help would be most appreciated.
Happy New Year!
Here’s a belated Christmas pressie for you (LOL):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzyznEewpio&NR=1
Regards,
Patrick
I had a go at getting this working on Windows.
I seemed to get it running, but I ran into an odd parsing glitch: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/thegooddale/pyerr.png
It may have been to do with the fact that I had to run it with python 2.5 rather than 2.6 because of an incompatibility with GTK.
More info:
http://www.daa.com.au/pipermail/pygtk/2009-February/016707.html
http://www.penjuinlabs.com/blog/?p=94
Also, I was thinking that you might actually be able to package this up as a single download that runs without installation. You could get portable python and then just add the BeautifulSoup/GTK modules to the /lib/site-packages directory, add your files and add a batch file or something that would open the iview-gtk file with the python command line.
Congratulations on getting it working on Windows! I tried myself, with no success. Did you have to change any code to get it working?
The parsing glitch is a bug in BeautifulSoup. It happens to some users on Linux as well (mainly Python 2.5 users), and I don’t think there’s much I can do about it without changing to something like ElementTree. (But I moved off ElementTree because it was incapable of parsing some of the ABC’s XML files as they contained syntax errors.)
And as for a “packaged up” solution, well, that all hinges on whether I can get my program to read the FLV from stdout, display a Save dialog, and save via GIO (or on Windows, just dump to disk). At the moment, it only saves to the working directory, which is obviously unacceptable if it were to be installed read-only in /usr or something.
Once that is done, I’ll have py2exe and .deb packages (and .rpm packages if my Fedora–based Mac hasn’t annoyed me in that week) available.
I didn’t change any of your code, but I did change the filenames of the iview-cli and iview-gtk files to give them a .py extension so that windows more easily recognise them as python files.
If you want a windows tester for any patches/update testing I’d be happy to help.
Just send me a whim on whirlpool: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/user/54877
BTW, why do you have a css rule on your site to set the opacity of your blog to 0.6? It makes it hard to read. :(
It’ll be even harder to read if you can’t get here in the first place.
Hi Jeremy
I’m experiencing the same zero file size problem as Patrick.
iview-gtk and ivew-cli both seem to begin a download and then:
Starting rtmpdump…
Backend debug: RTMPDump v1.9
(c) 2009 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL
Connecting …
and a zero sized file.
My system is Slackware 13
Python 2.6.2
I’ve tried with rtmpdump 1.6 and 1.9 – same result
I’ve run iview-cli –programme to make sure i’m not running into the mp4 problem, but no joy.
Regards
RobC
Hi Rob,
I’ve been debugging this in private with Patrick, and two days ago, I came across a potential workaround. Could you please try this, and tell me if it works for you:
./iview-cli --download mp4:flash/playback/_definst_/beachcomber_09_01_01Hi Jeremy
running with that now – download is in progress (yay):
—
RTMPDump v1.9
(c) 2009 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL
Connecting …
Starting download at: 0.000 kB
Metadata:
duration 3534.84
moovPosition 276552212
width 640
height 368
videocodecid avc1
audiocodecid mp4a
avcprofile 100
avclevel 41
aacaot 2
videoframerate 25
audiosamplerate 44100
audiochannels 2
trackinfo:
length 88371
timescale 25
language und
sampledescription:
sampletype avc1
length 155882496
timescale 44100
language und
sampledescription:
sampletype mp4a
8314.262 kB / 108.00 sec (3.1%) (…and counting…)
—
here in rural vic this could take a while to complete (by tomorrow I hope :)
which is why your program is so important for those of us in rural aus who simply can’t stream iview
great work Jeremy
Thanks
Rob
Just confirming that the download worked fine and played in vlc with no problems
Cheers
Rob
Awesome stuff!
I should probably let you know that VLC is perfectly capable of playing from a half-downloaded file, so if a file is nearly finished, you can start playing it already. Or you can just test the first few seconds of it to make sure it works.
Now I just need to get this integrated into Python-iView so you don’t need to do workarounds like this! :)
I have not been able to get this to work. In spite of spending 2 days on it but have narrowed it down to rtmpdump but have no clue what to do next. I am on Ubuntu 9.10 and have downloaded all the requirements / dependences.
My error message is quire consistent and applies to the command line interface.
You don’t have rtmpdump accessible from your
$PATH. What that means is that you need to put thertmpdumpexecutable in the/usr/local/binfolder, so it can be found by Python-iView.If you’re coming from a Windows perspective, you possibly added the
rtmpdumpexecutable to thepython-iviewdirectory to do that. But in the Unix world, that doesn’t work (for security reasons).You were right. I have moved both python-iview and rtmpdump executable to the usr/local/bin folder. Now it opens rtmpdump but gives the following errors:
Many thanks for your time and assistance. Cheers. Sean
That’s because if you have the latest version of Python-iView (type “
bzr pull” just to make sure), you don’t need to prefix anymp4:or anything like that any more.Just download what
./iview-cli --programmetells you to, verbatim. So in that case, I’d type “./iview-cli --download ironman_09_01_17.mp4“.(Also, it needs the ability to write files in the directory you are currently in. So if you have chmod’ed
/usr/share/python-iviewto be only writable by root, you won’t have the best of luck downloading, unless you change to a writable directory first.)It appears that I have hit the 0.00MB filesize problem finally after everything works. I have amended the properties of python_iview to allow others to create files within folder and for good measure – shared the folder so it should allow me to create a downloaded file.
In spite of that, it does not work. Just goes through the motions and then disconnects.
I have tried downloading other programmes with no luck. Any ideas as I am stuck. I am barely literate on command line codes so this is intensive for me.
Thanks a lot for your assistance. Appreciate any assistance. Cheers. Sean
PS: I am resident in the UK. Does this matter?
Ah yes, being in the UK would be a problem. Really disappointed to break this to you, but iView is only available in Australia.
Python-iView is not able to subvert these restrictions — it is simply an alternative client to the official Flash–based client. Apart from the fact that it uses Python and rtmpdump, it works in exactly the same way.
If you have a VPN connection to a server in Australia, it may be possible to thwart the geo-blocking filters (but be aware that is possibly illegal due to copyright restrictions, but I am not a lawyer).
However, iView is not the only source of video from the ABC. The downloads page may contain videos that are available to you in the UK. (Not 100% sure though.)
Thanks. It finally dawned on me as I was signing off this morning that perhaps its these stupid restrictions. Thanks. Wish I could use your application to download ITV programmes which wont allow you to download, only stream and with louse speeds, the experience is not gratifying.
Cheers. Sean
Hi Jeremy,
Is it possible this script would work with Python2.5 and Beautifulsoup ?
Cheers
Ok, should of downloaded it first, I’ve been checking with my Linux device with Python2.5 and BeautifulSoup but in the GTK not all programs are downloadable just lists them but doesn’t show any shows, also they all seem to have around everything, not sure if this is just my device or something was updated with ABCivew
Cheers
Rip
Ok Sorry AGAIN, the last post seemed to strip off any thing with the tags I wrote and now doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Everything in the GTK menu seems list list every show with CDATA around it in tags, and not all of the TV shows seem to have any episodes to download at all, just the headings.
Sorry about the multiple posts.
Cheers
Hi Rip. Yes, the CDATA problem is an incompatibility with Python 2.5. Upgrade to Python 2.6 and your problem will be fixed.
And with regards to the TV shows without episodes — I haven’t looked far enough into it, but I do believe it is because of the lack of categories support in Python-iView. Don’t worry — those shows are not available for watching on the official iView website either. It is caused by uncleanliness in the ABC provided programme.
Ok, Thanks for the heads up, I think I’m stuck with Python 2.5 at the moment (was testing this with Maemo OS on a phone) and Python 2.5 seems to be the only one available at the moment.
It does seem to work ok though :)
Cheers
Rip
This is why open source is the way to go. XBMC is a fine example of that :)
If you look at the returned XML ( http://pastebin.ca/1754892 ), you can see that only some shows have episodes available (shown in the XML as “item” elements)
Hey wow, that’s interesting. I swear that last time I looked at the index (around November), it didn’t have those
<item>tags.So that makes it easier. All I have to do is filter out all the programmes with no
<item>’s.You are a legend
Thanks. :)
[...] Python-iView users are invited to update their setups to support the latest JSON–based index the ABC pushed yesterday. The index is in a more compact format, which means that loading the GTK+ interface should be faster for you. [...]
Yes Jeremy you are a legend!
All working for me on Linux 9.10 ‘Karmic’ aka Linux i7 2.6.31-18-generic, x86_64 GNU/Linux.
My only stumble was that I couldn’t compile rtmpdump.
I found a work around in the ‘IView_Downloader_Linux_V6.2′ package (see the whirlpool Iview Downloads page) that includes several pre-compiled versions of rtmpdump. Renaming (and copying to /usr/local/sbin/) ‘rtmpdump-32bit-x86-ubuntu-1.9′ to ‘rtmpdump_x86′ worked fine.
Would like to compile a Ubuntu Karmic 64bit version of rtmpdump. Any thoughts or hints on this would be appreciated.
Thank you from another rural user with no other option for watching my favourite ABC programs via Iview.
Firstly, thanks very much. :)
What problems did you run into compiling rtmpdump? I find that rtmpdump compiles beautifully with only (as far as I can recall) the
build-essentialpackage installed. Make surebuild-essentialis installed, and typemake. Should compile fine.I have the Karmic version (11.4) of build Essential installed.
In reviewing the error messages it appears I may have some files missing, however it is pretty much all googbly-gook to me.
I downloaded the source via this link http://lkcl.net/rtmp/rtmpdump-1.9.tgz.
Again much thanks, especially for your quick response!
Output from the make command…..
Hi Again,
Your help much appreciated.
Despite au.archive.ubuntu.com throwing authentication warnings I managed to install libssl-dev and I’ve ended up with rtmpdump & streams compiled into executables – hooray!
Although I did get a warning produced by the make command, Included here just FYI
rtmpdump.cpp: In function ‘int GetLastKeyframe(FILE*, int, uint32_t*, char**, int*, uint32_t*)’:
rtmpdump.cpp:577: warning: ignoring return value of ‘size_t fread(void*, size_t, size_t, FILE*)’, declared with attribute warn_unused_result
Got it working and downloaded a 135.6 Mb mp4 file of the new inventors but haven’t been able to play it. Is the cli work around to do with being able to download the file or the files content/format/playability?
Hardy 8.04 here. Have tried adding restricted extras, everything gstreamer I could find, totem, vlc and mplayer. No joy yet.
If you have every GStreamer package under the sun installed, you should definitely have H.264 support in there somewhere. Run
gst-inspect-0.10 | grep H.264and tell me what you get.Alternatively, try downloading another video just to make sure it isn’t corrupted. (e.g. the Thomas the Tank Engine trailer is only about 10MB, albeit in FLV format, not MP4)
We get:
ffmpeg: ffdec_h264: FFMPEG H.264 video decoder
Wow that was a quick reply btw!
It plays on vlc on a vi$ta machine so the download worked ok.
Thanks for the help Jeremy.
I can play the file downloaded with linux once copyed to windows in vlc so that means rtmpdump worked right???
The play errors on linux are as follows:
vlc
(the first line repeats many time so I only included one)
[flv @ 0xb1fe0110]Unsupported video codec (7)
[00000359] main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `undf’.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.
[00000399] main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `undf’.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.
[00000283] main playlist: stopping playback
Totem:
** Message: Error: Internal data stream error.
gstflvdemux.c(528): gst_flv_demux_loop (): /play/decodebin0/flvdemux0:
stream stopped, reason error
I tryed ffmpeg2theora on it too and got:
(lots of the first line repeated again)
[flv @ 0xb7f75110]Unsupported video codec (7)
Input #0, flv, from ‘newinv_10_07_01.mp4′:
Duration: 00:27:31.0, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0.0: Video: 0×0007, 25.00 fps(r)
Stream #0.1: Audio: 0×000a, 44100 Hz, stereo
No video or audio stream found.
What do others use to play the mp4 files on linux?
Hi ant,
If you are using a Ubuntu distribution you can install the “Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras”.
I did a google search ‘Things to do after installing Ubuntu ‘, and came up with some good advise on getting things to work properly.
To answer your question, I use VLC (Totem works just as well – I’m more familiar with VLC).
I got this when playing an .mp4 file with VLC.
avformat debug: detected format: flv
main debug: selecting program id=0
avformat debug: adding es: video codec = h264
avformat debug: adding es: audio codec = mp4a
avformat debug: AVFormat supported stream
avformat debug: – format = flv (FLV format)
avformat debug: – start time = 0
avformat debug: – duration = 1784008000
main debug: using demux module “avformat”
avcodec debug: libavcodec initialized (interface 0×341400)
avcodec debug: ffmpeg codec (H264 – MPEG-4 AVC (part 10)) started
main debug: using decoder module “avcodec”
Hope that helps
Thanks Trebor
I have restricted extras installed and still no play. I installed a few other packages to do with H264 and mp4 also but nothing yet.
If I CAN play the file downloaded with linux once I copy it to to windows can I conclude libssl-dev worked properly when compiled?
Yes, you can conclude that rtmpdump compiled just fine. It’s definitely a codec issue. I had a friend that had a similar problem — she could not play any FLV files whatsoever, despite having the codecs installed.
I reinstalled my friend’s computer from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 shortly later, so we never got a chance to actually get to the bottom of the problem, unfortunately. I’ll see what I can come up with, but I’m pretty stumped at the moment.
Ok:). Thats what I suspected but wasn’t 100% sure about.
Thanks for the heads up on hardy btw.
Ah, that’s because you need
libssl-devinstalled to compile it. Whenever you get “error, no such file” problems, it’s a good idea to look at what it’s missing (in this case,openssl), look it up, and then install any interesting-devpackages that go with it.(If
rtmpdumpwere packaged, you’d be able to typeapt-get build-dep rtmpdumpto get the right build dependencies automatically. But then again, if it were packaged, you wouldn’t have to compile it in the first place. ;))