Request support for downloading and combining Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming (f4f) files

[2011]

As the main benefit of youtube-dl is to largely automate tasks that users can
(usually) perform manually, I want to request support for a streaming method
that is growing in popularity - Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming. Performing the
tasks of collecting information about, downloading, and combining .f4f video
segments could benefit dramatically from being able to do it with youtube-dl.
I did search the issues, and am a bit surprised that I didn't find this
mentioned (requested) before.

Someone has written a php (not a scripting language available on most
computers) script to do much of the work required, but I still believe that
youtube-dl (and its users) would benefit from support for this.

This explains some of the technical details:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/adobe-media-server/articles/dynamic-streaming-protection.html

This forum post explains some of the issues:

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/342430-F4F-capturing-converting

This is the wiki for the AdobeHDS.php script:

https://github.com/K-S-V/Scripts/wiki

And this is the latest version of the script itself:

https://github.com/K-S-V/Scripts/blob/master/AdobeHDS.php

This is an addon (firefox only) written by the author of the AdobeHDS.php script.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hds-link-detector/

Thank you for considering this.

[jaimeMF]

I've done some work on it, see https://github.com/jaimeMF/f4m-dl for the code I've written, although I think it's not ready for using in youtube-dl (I hope I can improve it and add it), I have tested with some of the requested sites (like rutube) that uses f4m and it work fine.

[2011]

Glad to see that someone is working on this. I will definitely follow
your progress. Is it possible for an ordinary user to test your code
(I have youtube-dl installed, but really don't know python at all)?

Just for the record, I found a recent commit for another project (in
perl). I doubt it will help you much, but you never know.

https://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/issues/detail?id=507

Thanks again.