Before we begin, let me direct your attention here:
Now then, from time to time there are parts of the broadcast of the proceedings of the House of Commons I’d like to put on YouTube. The parliamentary website makes video of the proceedings available here. Here’s an example of a page with links to obtain the videos for a particular parliamentary event.
Could someone have a look at the different viewing options available here and tell me how to grab the video?
I’m pretty sure this is possible, because I see other people putting such clips up all the time and I’m pretty sure they’re not ordering the clips in a convenient format from the Library of Parliament because of how quickly they get put up.
Note: Their site appears to be broken. I can’t connect to the server where the videos actually are. You’ll have to prod them to fix this before you can actually get any of them. (This might be because I am, how you say, le filthy stupid American.)
*(In Firefox, open the special page about:config (type about:config into the address bar), right-click in the main page, click ‘New’ in the menu, click ‘Boolean’ in the menu forked off from New, enter ‘network.protocol-handler.expose.mms’ into the dialog box, then select ‘false’ in the new dialog box. Then just click the link, and find where VLC is installed, and open the application. You might want to do the same thing with ‘network.protocol-handler.expose.rtsp’ as well.)
You can also avoid reconfiguring Firefox, since they give direct links. Just right click and copy the URL. Then paste that directly into VLC.
I was going to say that my way was easier, but maybe you’d find messing around a bit and then just being able to click directly to be easier than always having to copy and paste.
OK, another question: I used the method described in the link and it works like a charm, with one problem: it takes as long to download the clip as the clip is. Unfortunately, the video from Parliament can be as long as twelve hours long. Obviously this is not practical. Is there a good way to grab either a specific portion of the clip, or to do so more quickly?
The video is probably compressed to be just bad enough that they can handle sending it to you just fast enough to be watchable in real time. That means that you can’t download it faster than you can watch it. Once you have it, cropping it down is easy enough, given the right software.
You’ll need to find screen capture software, like BowlOfDucks suggests. Then you can jump forward and record whatever it is that you’re watching, as you watch it.
Actually, you don’t need any software or configuration at all. As BigT points out, they have direct links to the files. All you have to do is grab a copy of the URL and download the file (you’ll have to remove the mms: protocol specifer from the front of the link, because that causes the configured video app to launch). I just did it with no trouble at all.
