Saving AllThingsD videos

I think Walt Mossberg's interviews with Steve Jobs at D1, D2, D3, D5 (with Bill Gates) and D8 are historically tremendously interesting. So I wanted to archive them myself which turned out to be a bit difficult as the Wall Street Journal has gone to quite some effort to make sure the normal video downloading tools don't work.

I ended up getting the RTMP URLs by installing Replay Media Catcher which shows URLs like rtmp://cp49988.edgefcs.net:1935/ondemand/74940/?ovpfv=2.1.4<break>video/20100502/040210atdjobsatd1/040210atdjobsatd1. The free trial version of this software only downloads the first half of any streams, so I wanted to use MPlayer to download the entire streams which I knew supports RTMP.

However, the URL is strange where it contains the odd <break> indicator which I didn't know what to do with. Googling around pointed me at RTMPDump which has separate options for the different components of the RTMP URL. The solution turned out to be the following command:

$ rtmpdump \
 -r 'rtmp://cp49988.edgefcs.net:1935' \
 -a 'ondemand/74940/?ovpfv=2.1.4' \
 -y 'video/20100502/040210atdjobsatd1/040210atdjobsatd1' \
 -o 'steve-jobs-d1-2003.flv'

Just to make sure, I'll also archive versions converted to MP4 using

$ ffmpeg \
 -i steve-jobs-d1-2003.flv \
 -qscale 5 -acodec copy \
 steve-jobs-d1-2003.mp4

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