[PBS] Downloading lowest quality

[bchandos]

I tried several PBS videos and each time, the lowest quality stream was downloaded (usually 284p). "-f" and "--max-quality" did nothing. Looking at the extractor, it gets the URL from "alternate_encoding" which in the JSON, calls a file with eeid "mp4-baseline-16x9". I believe "recommended_encoding" should be used as it calls eeid "hls-2500k-16x9" which I believe to be the highest resolution stream. Unfortunately, I lack even the basic skills to test this!

Example URL: http://video.pbs.org/video/2365089043/
Relevant JSON: http://video.pbs.org/videoInfo/2365089043/?format=json

Edit: I should note that web player offers a range of quality streams, from 720p down. The URL provided by "alternate_coding" resolves directly to a video stream, while the URL provided by "recommended_encoding" resolves in a m3u8 file, and lists a mime-type of "application/x-mpegURL".

[bchandos]

I have ZERO python experience, but curiosity drove me to mess around with my local copy. I noticed that there is an m3u8 handling function. But when I passed the URL from "recommended_encoding" it did not get called because the URL is a redirect. I used urllib to pass the redirected URL:

Old
'url': info['alternate_encoding']['url'],

New
'url': urllib.urlopen(info['recommended_encoding']['url']).geturl(),

This did invoke _download_m3u8_with_ffmpeg and it started ... doing stuff ... but resulted in:

[buffer @ 0x2973140] Invalid pixel format string '-1'
Error opening filters!
ERROR: ffmpeg exited with code 1

I tried 3 different videos with the same result.

[dstftw]

PBS HD is supported in the latest version.