12/11/11 15:47:22 ¶ ●

How to Download Apple's Steve Jobs Memorial Event (And Other Streams) for Offline Usage

Ever since Apple put up Steve’s memorial event I was wondering how I could save the video to my hard disk. Here’s how to do it, this works for other videos as well.

• Go the Apple Event page
• Open the source code of the page (⌘⌥U in Safari)
• Near the top it says something like <script type… followed by a couple of snowLeopard and non-snowLeopard URLs to so called Quicktime Referenced Movies¹. This means the whole video is referenced from other files. All we need to do is transcode the referenced movies to a (new self-contained) movie.
• Copy your preferred video quality URL to the clipboard (everything other than the snowLeopard URL should work). (I chose the non-snowLeopard one).
• Open a new tab/window in Safari, paste the URL and press ⌥↩. The file should start to download. If not you need to find another way to download the file.
• Open the downloaded file in VLC.
• You should see something like this:

If you double click on of the rtsp:// entries the movie should start to play. Every RTSP has a different quality.
I wanted to have the highest quality possible, which means I want/needed to transcode the last entry in the playlist. So in the next step:

• File → Streaming/Transcoding Wizard
• Select Transcode/Save to file, then Next
• Enable Existing playlist item and choose the stream you want to save. In my case the lowest one. Click next.
• In the Transcode section you can leave all checkmarks off. In case you want to transcode to a foreign media format select your desired options. I left everything unchecked. Next.
• Encapsulation format: I chose MOV, but MPEG 4 / MP4 is also sufficient. Next.
• Select the file to save to. Click Choose… and enter a name for the video. Click Next and then Finish.

The Transcoding Wizard will transcode the stream to a new MPEG 4 movie in real time. After about an hour, VLC will stop and you will have a new movie file containing the streamed media.