How can I download Adobe Connect videos to mp4 or speed up listening?
Ideas:
-
Hack my computer in some way so as to make the video playback faster by making time pass faster in the CPU or something for this Chrome Flash Player application. I think this is possible for the video at least, and for the sound, I hope this will not change its pitch. My OS is a Debian-based version of Linux.
-
Screen record the whole thing, but this would still be tedious since it would require me to have a dedicated computer running for that, I couldn't do something else at the same time.
-
Download the videos by using the existing
/output/filename.zip?download=zip
hack that is to append this to the URL. But this results in a zip file full of 17 (or more) harsh.flv
and.xml
files containing separated audio and video. I searched for a tool to convert those back to the regular video, and I haven't found anything useful. I found that those annoying and harsh files are the same than the ones that are already downloaded in the browser's cache for the playback. -
Ask every professor to unlock the mp4 download such as enabling the possibility of using
/output/filename.mp4?download=mp4
withdownload=mp4
rather than a harsh zip file. But I fear that this would require them to allow their video to be publicly accessible by anyone in their admin settings, so I'm not sure this is an option for them.
Best Answer
Assume that the Adobe Connect ID is p6vwxp2d0c2f, i.e. the URL is https://my.adobeconnect.com/p6vwxp2d0c2f. As you mentioned in the question, you can add
/output/p6vwxp2d0c2f.zip?download=zip
at the end of the URL to download some zip archive containing a bunch of audio and video files as well as some .xml files. E.g., https://my.adobeconnect.com/p6vwxp2d0c2e/output/p6vwxp2d0c2e.zip?download=zip could contain:To merge them, you can use
ffmpeg
(I took theffmpeg
commands from Oliver Wang / Yannick Hold-Geoffroy / Aaron Hertzmann):where:
-map 0:a:0
: map the first input file to be used just for the audio.-map 1:v:0
: map the second input file to be used just for the video.-shortest
: cut the audio or video in case cameraVoip_1_11.flv and screenshare_2_10.flv don't have the same length.If you want to keep the webcam video and place it in some corner of the video screen sharing:
Regarding mapping the cameraVoip__.xml to the correct screenshare__.xml, in case there is more than one:
One could look at the cameraVoip__.xml / screenshare__.xml to get the timestamps of when the audio / screen share video began. This allows to map the screenshare__.xml with the correct cameraVoip__.xml.
E.g., in https://my.adobeconnect.com/p6vwxp2d0c2f/output/p6vwxp2d0c2f.zip?download=zip, from cameraVoip_1_11.xml, line 21:
Otherwise, another way could be to sort cameraVoip__.xml / screenshare__.xml, then map the first cameraVoip__.xml with the first screenshare__.xml, the second cameraVoip__.xml with the first screenshare__.xml, etc. I don't know if it'd break in some cases (seems to be ok for the couple of Adobe Connect recordings I looked at but perhaps that's because people always share screens).
I wrote some python script to automate the process (code repo: https://github.com/Franck-Dernoncourt/adobe-connect-video-downloader):