Scripts for viewing Olympic video

So, NBC is putting quite a bit of video online at nbcolympics.com.

However, if you decide to try and check out a bit of backstage action on your linux box, you'll be told (politely) "Go away, kid, ya bother me".

However, the intrepid folks over in the Ubuntu forums have come up with a way, albeit convoluted, for those of us on the fringes to take part. Basically, they've created 3 different scripts to parse the Olympic site and parse out the stream urls, which you can then pass into your favorite media player.

The first, and least effective for me is nbcsched.py It takes two arguments, the sport and whether you want live or recorded. It will then return a list of streams based on the criteria.

ajb@wembley:~/olympics$ python nbcsched.py badminton live

Mixed Doubles Bronze-Medal Match

mmsh://msolympics-ENC11-high.wm.llnwd.net/msftolympicslive-live/msolympics_ENC11_high?e=1218970072&=5ad555469147663221ba5ed234a30a0b

ajb@wembley:~/olympics$ mplayer mms://msolympics-ENC11-high.wm.llnwd.net/msftolympicslive-live/msolympics_ENC11_high?e=1218970072&h=5ad555469147663221ba5ed234a30a0b

(Note that I removed the "h" from the URL as mplayer won't play mmsh URLS.)

However, NBC appears to be playing games with the URLs, as they "expire" and you'll get a "Technical Difficulties" stream instead of your match.If you are fast on the cut and paste, it works about half the time. Piping works at about the same percentage.

The second method give me greater success. nbcquick-rev2.py takes an "asset" from a URL string and converts that into the mms stream:

ajb@wembley:~/$ python nbcquick-rev2.py fn2h-bj-sd09-081708-175003 ... mms://msolympics-ENC09-high.wm.llnwd.net/msftolympicslive-live/msolympics_ENC09_high?e=1218970407\&h=a9da4c51e9efe8a28c7a08a7968a8198

$ mplayer 'mms://' 

(Note the escapes) The asset number comes from the url on nbcolympics.com when you click on the video feed.