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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

I apologize for being offtopic, but this is a horrendously bad video player. If you pause the video for more than a minute or so it loses its play position. Scrubbing through the video to find where you got disconnected is painful and glitchy. There is no way to adjust the playback speed to 1.3x or 1.5x. This video player sucks. I'm glad flash is dead.

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Interestingly, I got redirected to rtsp://stolaf-flash.streamguys.net/vod/academic/academic/2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one-1

rtmpdump or VLC should help you there.

Actually, dumping this (or rather, the high quality link Adaptive mentions) with VLC/mplayer/openrtsp has been a pain in the ass. I'll provide an Internet Archive link when I'm done downloading, transcoding, and QAing the resulting file.

https://archive.org/download/JerksAsshatsAndTheUnstablePolit...

I'd be interested to know what trouble you've had.

openrtmp wouldn't dump the stream (because it was an rtsp stream). Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

Then openRTSP wouldn't output an MP4 file properly.

So I used ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i "rtsp://stolaf-flash.streamguys.net/vod/academic/academic/2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one-4" -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f mp4 2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one.mp4

Note the "rtsp_transport" option; without that, I was getting UDP packet drops. Not good for archival purposes. Used the option for TCP to prevent said drops.

rtsp://stolaf-flash.streamguys.net/vod/academic/academic/2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one-4 is the higher resolution stream, fwiw.

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