Saving TVNZ “ondemand” episodes

The code in my previous post will work for episodes from TVNZ’s ondemand service; but there is a more direct approach.

Each episode page stores a URL to the episode’s playlist in a javascript property "playlist". The URL points to an XML file containing the URLs of four or more video parts and no ads. The following script downloads the episode page, grabs the playlist URL, downloads the playlist, and parses it. It returns a newline separated list of video URLs.

You will need to have curl and xmlstarlet installed.

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    echo "usage: $0 episode-url"
    exit 1
fi

EPISODE="$1"

PLAYLIST=http://tvnz.co.nz`curl "$EPISODE" | grep -Po "(?<=playlist: ').*?(?=')"`

curl "$PLAYLIST" | \
    xml sel -N smil=http://www.w3.org/ns/SMIL \
        -t -m "//smil:video[@systemBitrate='700000']" -v '@src' -n -

I have saved it as tvnz-grab and call it like so:

tvnz-grab <episode-page-url> | xargs curl -O

The four or five parts can be played as a single file using mplayer’s "-fixed-vo" option.