Download / rip / save RTE Player (Ireland) Content with no DRM as MP4 Video

Discussion in 'Media Guides' started by Hoffman, May 1, 2018.

  1. Hoffman

    Hoffman Addict

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    Downloading DRM free MP4 content from RTE Player (Ireland) is quite easy once you know how and is possible on Windows, OSX and Linux.

    RTE Player is an on demand video service provided by Irish public broadcaster RTE for programmes broadcast on RTE Television.

    This tutorial is for Windows, however the same tools are available for OSX and Linux too.

    Keep in mind that RTE Player is only accessible in Southern Ireland, and possibly Northern Ireland depending on your ISP. If you wish to access it from an international location then I can recommend NordVPN. If you use the coupon code "2YDeal2017" you can get 2 years service for only $79.99 which is a massive steal. I picked NordVPN because this allowed me to create this tutorial and download from outside of Ireland. Also it's a good fit because of its zero logging policy, it's Netflix US friendly as well as P2P friendly while operating out of Panama meaning DMCA and Blocking Streams just doesnt happen.

    Downloading from RTE Player:

    To make things a bit easier simply download my RTE Player (Ireland) download package. This consists of YouTube-DL and FFMPEG which are free open source tools you can download for various operating systems from the websites linked to.

    Unzip the RTE Player Download package somewhere, in this example this is in a folder on the root of my D:\ hard drive:

    rte-player-download-1.jpg

    Now open up a Command Prompt from the Windows start menu, this will be the Terminal on OSX and Linux.

    You want to change to the folder where the RTE download package is

    D:\ changes to my D hard drive

    cd rte-player-download-package changes to the folder on the hard drive which contains YouTube-DL and FFMPEG:

    rte-player-download-2.jpg

    To download content from RTE Player all you need to do is type youtube-dl, press spacebar then paste the URL to the program you wish to download.

    So for example: youtube-dl hxxps://xxx.rte.ie/player/ie/show/weather-30003847/10872854/

    rte-player-download-3.jpg

    You will see a FLV video file of that program is downloaded:

    rte-player-download-4.jpg

    FLV video is not a common video format, however it will only take a few seconds to remux this in to an MP4 video container which is almost universally supported by all devices today.

    To make things easy rename your video to something with a simple file name, in this example we download the weather so i've called the downloaded video "weather" and it has the flv file extension.

    rte-player-download-5.jpg

    To convert this to an MP4 simply type ffmpeg -i weather.flv -codec copy weather.mp4

    "weather" is the name of the file and should be changed accordingly.

    rte-player-download-6.jpg

    The end result will be you have a weather.mp4 video file which is DRM free:

    rte-player-download-7.jpg

    That's it, you have learned how to download content from RTE Player (Ireland).
     
  2. Chris Sherlock

    Chris Sherlock New Member

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    Hi @Hoffman , Does this support the new rte player upgrade do u know.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 28, 2019
  3. Hoffman

    Hoffman Addict

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    Probably, can't say for sure as I currently don't have access to a Irish VPN (access is blocked for international users). However if not you can try updating to the latest version of YouTube-DL.
     
  4. Joe Bloggs

    Joe Bloggs New Member

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    Hi @Hoffman...you do not need an Irish VPN to access the international version of the RTE player as it has programme content you can use to suss out if this still works.
     
  5. Hoffman

    Hoffman Addict

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    From what I can see the international version of RTE player is an app, not a website, meaning you can't get the URL's to download programs as described in this tutorial.

    I certainly see no option to stream content on a web browser.
     
  6. uberme

    uberme New Member

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    Hi Hoffman,

    I have tried to use the app bundle following the instructions above, however after RTE player's redesign it's stopped working.
    the download itself fails to initialize.

    I've looked in the page's source for a trace of .flv file but see none.

    Hopefully its something I'm doing wrong and not a break in the method since the redesign?

    -Uber
     
  7. Hoffman

    Hoffman Addict

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    Unfortunately this does now appear to be broken, unless YouTube-DL is updated nothing can be done at the moment.
     
  8. GersonH

    GersonH New Member

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    Do not know when YouTube-DL will be updated? I think your explanation of this process is interesting
     
  9. oldpom

    oldpom New Member

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    Hi, Even with the latest yt-dl, it is not possible to grab anyhting from RTE Player, keeps coming back wit "Unsupported URL"
     

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