Download Presentation Videos from InfoQ

InfoQ is a very resource full web site for anyone in the software industry. They have lot of articles, white papers, and presentations in various topics related to software engineering. Presentation videos found in InfoQ have being recorded during various conferences and are really useful. I really love watching those videos since it is great opportunity to listen to industry experts.

But the problem was that I had to sit in front of the browser and watch those videos. So I though of downloading those videos watch them when I have free time, or when I'm traveling. So I tried to download the flv using many of the free tools available in the web. But they were not successful at all. After many unsuccessful attempts, I found a way to download those presentations. It is a tool called Grub-Pro coming with Orbit-Downloader. Here is the tutorial for it. Only issue with this tool is that you have to use Internet Explorer. But no worries, as long as I can download the video, I don't mind even using IE for a while :)

grub-pro-in-IE

grub-pro-download

 

Reader Comments

use DownloadHelper. It also doing same. There are some sites they use streams. Still there are add-ons to copy the playing stream. I have done this for firefox in windows. But not is linux.

I've been using DownloadHelper Firefox addon to get InfoQ videos for a while. The only problem is you get only the video, not the slides.

Thanx sandrenu for this info

Here's how I managed to download an InfoQ video today:

1. Open the site with the video you want to download, eg: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Fowler-North-Crevasse-of-Doom

2. Click on the play button and wait for the video to start.

3. Stop the video and right click on it. In the Flash Player's context menu should be an entry named "Copy Log".

4. After clicking on "Copy Log" you have some log entries on your clipboard. Paste these into a text editor of your choice. The entries look like this:

22:09:42:333 --:--:-- NetConnection.Connect.Success ( rtmp://sxrl3x941kr4c.cloudfront.net/cfx/st/ )
22:09:43:222 --:--:-- NetStream.Play.Reset ( presentations/08-feb-yawningcrevasseofdoom )
22:09:43:223 --:--:-- NetStream.Play.Start ( presentations/08-feb-yawningcrevasseofdoom )
22:09:43:224 --:--:-- NetConnection.URI ( rtmp://sxrl3x941kr4c.cloudfront.net:1935/cfx/st )
22:09:43:224 --:--:-- NetStream.First.Byte
22:09:45:232 00:00:00 NetStream.Buffer.Full
22:09:46:920 00:00:02 NetStream.Pause.Notify
22:09:46:920 00:00:02 NetStream.Buffer.Flush

5. The essential parts are in the first and second line:
rtmp://sxrl3x941kr4c.cloudfront.net/cfx/st/
and
presentations/08-feb-yawningcrevasseofdoom
We'll need those in Step 8.

6. I've used the tool rtmpdump (http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/) to finally download the video. Maybe you could also use VLC but it didn't work for me.

7. If you're installing rtmpdump on Linux, simply download the sources, run "make SYS=posix" and you're ready to go.

8. Run "./rtmpdump -r rtmp://sxrl3x941kr4c.cloudfront.net/cfx/st/ -y presentations/08-feb-yawningcrevasseofdoom -o video.flv"

9. Done. :-) Verify that the video is working with your favorite video player (I used mplayer).

You may want to check out this:
https://github.com/myguidingstar/infoq-downloader
Works perfectly offline