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javascripttwitterdownloadvideo-streaminglive-streaming

Downloading/storing Periscope live streaming broadcasts

I'm crawling tweets and, if available, store information to external resources (e.g., Instagram images). Now poeple start using Periscope where users tweet links to a Periscope live streaming broadcast (also then available for the next 24h). Here is an example link, but it might be invalid/obsolete soon.

Is there any way I can fetch that broadcast, i.e., store it locally as a video file?

When I look at the source code of a Periscope broadcast, I get something like that:

<html>
<head>
  ...
  <script src="https://assets.periscope.tv/assets/bugsnag-2.min.js"></script>
  <script src="https://assets.periscope.tv/js/vendor.a8cd99eb89a488ec6ea465f57d3ad41bcd832eff.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
  <div id="periscope-app" class="u-fullHeight"></div>
  <script src="https://assets.periscope.tv/js/application.min.2a8176c317fb715fd0e6c2728cb04318c5c53941.js"></script>
</body>

So everything is essentially scripted. I've tried to look into the Javascript file to see if I can somehow at least reconstruct the stream URL or something. But I wasn't successful. I also tried with Google Chrome to inspect the requests made from the side. But this also didn't bring me any further.

EDIT: Here's my current Phantom.js script:

var page = require('webpage').create(),
  system = require('system'),
  t, address;

if (system.args.length === 1) {
  console.log('Usage: periscope.js <periscope-url>');
  phantom.exit();
}

page.onResourceRequested = function(request) {
  console.log('Request ' + JSON.stringify(request, undefined, 4));
};

page.onResourceReceived = function(response) {
  console.log('Receive ' + JSON.stringify(response, undefined, 4));
};

address = system.args[1];

page.settings.userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36';
page.open(address, function(status) {
  if (status !== 'success') {
    console.log('FAIL to load the address');
  } else {

  }
  //phantom.exit();
});

When I use Google Chrome's Developer Tools I find the application/vnd.apple.mpegurl request, but it never pops up from the Phantom.js script.

Solution

  • It uses Http Live Streaming (HLS) on Chrome Desktop so just proxy/sniff HTTP responses of type application/vnd.apple.mpegurl and get the request URL. I was able to watch your stream in VLC.

    You can use Phantom.js.