Greasy Fork

[solved] Vevo does not work

Hi,
great script, but it does not work with Vevo for me.
I just get the Vevo message "Oops, you need Flash Player...".
Is it just me or has anything changed regards compatibility.
Br
jakob.j

Nevermind, now it works suddenly (after I was giving up and enabled Chrome Flash plugin again).

[Little off-topic:
However, my original intent was to get the "ChromeCast version" of the Vevo videos. They seem to have a far better resolution/quality than the mp4 format I get here. Does anyone have a clue how to get the high quality ChromeCast Vevo videos?]

That is not a script issue. VEVO does use the user agent string from your browser in order to decide if the site will require flash or not. It is outside the scope of this script to defeat such behavior. You may modify your user agent in order to get a html5 version of the page (for example you can use an iPad user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5"). Extensions for that purpose are available for chrome and firefox (e.g. chrome UA spoofer). I need to modify the script a little bit in order to get it ti work with the html5 version of VEVO. The plan is to implement it with the next script version. Without spoofing the user agent you will need flash to be installed and enabled if you want to use VEVO, even if it is not required for video playback.

I don't know about the ChromeCast version of VEVO. Is there a way to see the video without actually having a chromecast? Anyway I think the script is extracting all existing video qualities with h.264 compression. You can select the quality in the menu.

Well after a while trying to research about this topic, it's still not completely clear what's going on but I think I'm pretty sure about these points (but I also could be wrong):
- Vevo usually provides videos in 720p maximum (e.g. on their web site and on youtube)
- They have 1080p versions of many (or most?) videos (and maybe these are the ones used for ChromeCast)
- But Vevo, for some reasons, tries to make it hard to access these 1080p versions (even by changing their URL format regularly)

This is the best example I found:
http://www.vevo.com/watch/cassadee-pope/i-wish-i-could-break-your-heart/USUV71302923 (I can only access the 720p version)
See this github post: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/2409
This "smil" file (whatever they are) indicates that there are 1080p versions of the video: http://smil.lvl3.vevo.com/v3/smil/USUV71302923/usuv71302923r.smil

I haven't tried yet to sniff the traffic of my ChromeCast via WireShark or something, but however I am not too optimistic about that. But I will try it when I have time.

Here are some more links of my investigation:
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/3656
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/2874
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/3028
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/3207

Just to bring this to a conclusion :)
One is able to download the 1080p versions using the youtube-dl tool:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

I have updated the script to include higher resolution videos (if available) and it should now also work if flash is not installed (at least basic features). It is still better to have flash installed or use a user agent spoofer in order to see the video info and get better performance.

Can you test and give me some feedback?

Very cool! Works perfectly :)