In this age of streaming video, some websites make it easy to grab clips off the website. Bless those websites who make it easy. However, a curse of pox to those who go out of their way to make it difficult.
FC2 is one of those make it difficult websites. There is no download option. And online webpage utilities are mostly useless. They do have their uses.
First off, all websites claiming to offer tools for grabbing FC2 video LIE. None of the ones I tried were able to grab anything. 1 however DID grab something which ultimately proved useful. A Playlist. And not just any playlist. FC2 makes it difficult to download videos by breaking them up into smaller segments. The playlist I got for the video I wanted was 148 smaller ".ts" files. .ts stands for Transport Stream. When I looked at it, it's essentially an MP4 h264 encoded file without an index.
Looking at the play list, it was a list of URLs for all the smaller parts. I grabbed the 1st 3 and used DOS' Binary Concatenate Copy feature to test them. And as hopefully expected, it played in VLC where it was able to confirm the compressor and resolution.
About an hour and 148 segments later and a couple batch files run, I had my video file! Though one more thing was necessary. I used an older version of Media Coder which I like and copied the raw streams directly into an MP4 container file which displayed the duration and let me seek around without issues.
There's an opportunity for someone to make a program for either Desktop or Android which opens a target file, finds that segment play list, and then sequentially access and download each piece and saves it as 1 file. Can anyone do that without f^cking things up? No viruses or malware??
