PlayGrabber allows the user to download all episodes of a show on svtplay.se. It works like a modern-day VCR, which you can program to download new episodes on a regular basis of your favourite shows.
It is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
PlayGrabber requires Python and the Scrapy web scraping framework.
PlayGrabber needs ffmpeg to download the videos. It is possible that libav will work as well, but this has not been tested. Furthermore, wget is needed to download the subtitles.
While PlayGrabber should not technically require Linux, it has been developed on Linux and only tested on Linux. It is probably more or less painless to get it to work on other unix-like platforms (like Mac OS X), and more or less painful to get it to work on Windows.
PlayGrabber can be used in several ways:
- To download all episodes that are available right now for a show on svtplay.se
- To check a show or collection of show for new episodes, and download them
While 1 is useful, 2 is what makes PlayGrabber shine! The typical usecase is that you add a new show for "watching" by PlayGrabber, and then regularly (typically, once every night) run PlayGrabber and let it grab new episodes for your show(s).
If you want to check more than a single show, you will need a 'base' directory, in which all your shows are stored. The base directory will to contain a bunch of subdirectories, one for each show.
If you are interested in just a single show, you can instead use a specific 'out' directory. PlayGrabber will assume that the show is inside this directory, and not a level down as with the base directory.
If you want to add a new show, you will need to specify it's URL. Just go to the show in question on your web browser. Any episode will do, although I find it easiest to go to the start page of the show e.g. by searching for it. Copy the URL from the browser and use that.
If you just want to check a previously added show or list of shows, you don't need to specify any URL.
To run PlayGrabber, cd to the playgrabber directory and run
scrapy crawl playgrabber [options]
where options are:
-a url=<URL> -- To specify an URL, e.g. -a url=http://www.svtplay.se/foo-show
-a out=<directory> -- To specify an 'out' directory, see above. Cannot be combined with -a base.
-a base=<directory> -- To specify a 'base' directory, see above. Cannot be combined with -a out.
-o <json-output> -- Store information about downloaded shows as a json file. (This functionality is build-in in scrapy,
but can often come in handy.)
PlayGrabber is reading the contents of svtplay.se and parsing the HTML code to understand what videos are available, what relationship they have, and how they can be downloaded. This approach is fragile by nature, and any changes to the structure or format of the svtplay.se web site can disable PlayGrabber from functioning. Such changes can occur at any time, and only a corresponding fix in PlayGrabber will restore functionality.
While there is no guarantee of such updates for future breaking changes in svtplay.se, the author is using PlayGrabber personally, and has historically updated PlayGrabber swiftly when such changes happen.
PlayGrabber can only download videos that are allowed to your IP address, and are in the HLS format (in practice, this means "available on a mobile platform"). To what extent these limitations apply to a specific video is completely determined by svtplay.se. As a rule of thumb, if you can watch the video from a browser running on the same computer as PlayGrabber, you will pass the IP address test. And if you can watch the video on a mobile device, it is available in the HLS format.
PlayGrabber is in itself limited to extracting the URL for the video and subtitle, and creating suitable command lines for running the ffmpeg and wget downloaders, which will do the actual job of downloading the video and the subtitles.
For efficient use, designate a base directory, e.g. /movies/PlayGrabber. Now you can add the show "Foo Show" by
scrapy crawl playgrabber -a base=/movies/PlayGrabber -a url=http://www.svtplay.se/foo-show
PlayGrabber will automatically create a directory based on the name of the show ("Foo Show"), and download the available episodes with names like "Foo Show.S01.E01.The mystery begins". Both the video (as .mp4) and the subtitles, if available, (as .srt) will be downloaded for each episode.
When this is done, you can at any time check for and download new episodes like this:
scrapy crawl playgrabber -a base=/movies/PlayGrabber
I recommend you create a simple script to do this for you. For instance, create
/usr/local/bin/update-playgrabber.sh with:
#!/bin/bash
cd /opt/playgrabber
TODAY=`date +"%Y-%m-%d"`
scrapy crawl playgrabber -a base=/movies/PlayGrabber -o /var/log/playgrabber/$TODAY.json > /var/log/playgrabber/$TODAY.log 2>&1
This assumes that you have stored PlayGrabber in /opt/playgrabber, and that the user running the script have write permissions to /var/log/playgrabber. It will store logs with downloaded files as *.json and the verbose scrapy output as *.log.
To have this script run at 4:00 am every night, run 'crontab -e' and add the following line:
00 04 * * * /usr/local/bin/update-playgrabber.sh
PlayGrabber stores information about the show and downloaded episodes in two hidden files,
.playgrabber.json and .playgrabber-show.json.
The file .playgrabber.json contains information about all your downloaded episodes. If you delete this file, PlayGrabber
will forget about all your downloaded files. Do not do this, unless you really want that to happen.
The file .playgrabber-show.json contains general information about the show. A few fields in this file is possible to edit by
a text editor, to modify the behavior of PlayGrabber for that show:
- show_title: You can modify this to use another name for the show when creating filenames.
- get_subtitles: The default value is true. If set to false, no subtitles will be downloaded.
- filter_out: See below.
- show_season_title_map: See below.
It is not recommended to modify any other values.
If this is non-empty, it is interpreted as a regex that is matched against the episode name. If it matches, the episode is not downloaded. Use this to e.g. filter out "syntolkat".
svtplay.se does not use season numbering internally, but instead uses a show id. PlayGrabber does some heuristics to try to get a good season number to use (or none for shows where season is not applicable), but it can fail sometimes.
If your shows end up named "Foo Show.Show-4711.E01.Wtf", you can change this here. Locate ".Show-4711" in the map, and modify it to a better value. Note that you will probably want to keep the leading dot.
PlayGrabber is open source, and is licensed under the GPLv3 license. The main author is magicus and the latest version of PlayGrabber can always be found on this GitHub page.
Any contributions to PlayGrabber are more than welcome!