16.02.2008

Lotusphere 2008 Podcasts download helper (Update)

>>Author:  Thomas Bahn
>>Ort:     Raisdorf

URL: http://www.assono.de/blog/d6plinks/Lotusphere2008-Podcasts-download-helper

Category: Lotusphere, Konferenzen

All Lotusphere 2008 attendees should have gotten notifications by now, that they can download the session recordings as mp3 files, in an email with subject "Accessing Lotusphere 2008 MP3s".

As Jim Knight stated in the second comment for Lotusphere MP3 site, screenshot. Bulk downloader possible? in the IdoNotes (and sleep) blog by Chris Miller, you must enter your password in UPPERCASE!

But downloading more than one or two of the podcasts can get quite time consuming, since it involves a lot of manual interactions (and many browser windows).

In order to download all mp3 files, I've created an Excel sheet to create some download helper files, I want to share:

Lotusphere2008-Podcasts-download-helper.zip
(12 Kb)

These are the necessary steps to use this file

Download the zip archive and extract the Excel sheet.
Find the "Accessing Lotusphere 2008 MP3s" email and log into the given URL with your LS08.net account. Enter your password in UPPERCASE!
Click on any session and copy the session key (32 digit hexadecimal number between "key=" and "&eventuserid") from the URL into cell B3 of the Excel sheet.
Download all files using one of the following alternatives (see below). For some sessions there are no podcasts (yet).
Rename the downloaded files using one of the two alternatives (see further below)

Download alternative 1: Download using HTML page and some download helper application (like FDM)

Copy the contents of cell range C7 - C141 into a text file and name it "Lotusphere 2008 Podcasts download helper.html"
Open this file in your favorite browser and download all links using your favorite download helper application.
For example, with FDM you can press Crtl+F3 to download all files.

Download alternative 2: Download using wget

Download wget, if you haven't already. You can get the Windows binaries at http://www.christopherlewis.com/WGet/WGetFiles.htm; see http://wget.addictivecode.org/FrequentlyAskedQuestions?action=show&redirect=Faq#download for other platforms.
Unzip the archive into some new directory and put the file name and path of the wget executable into cell B4 of the Excel sheet. If the path contains any spaces, put the complete file path in double quotes.
Copy the contents of the cell range D8 - D140 into a new text file and name it "Lotusphere 2008 Podcasts wget download helper.cmd".
Execute this batch file and wait for the downloads.

Renaming alternative 1: long names
To rename the downloaded files to long names like "AD311 Object Oriented Programming with LotusScript - Take It To the Next Level.mp3":

Copy the contents of the cell range E8 - E140 into a new text file and name it "Downloaded podcasts renamer (long names).cmd".
Execute this batch file.

Renaming alternative 2: short names
To rename the downloaded files to short names like "AD311.mp3":

Copy the contents of the cell range F8 - F140 into a new text file and name it "Downloaded podcasts renamer (short names).cmd".
Execute this batch file.

Thanks again to Stephan Wissel for his Lotussphere Presentation Batch Download.

Update:
I have appended the Application Development Keynote (internal session number 134), which is not correctly linked on the on24.com website. Thanks, Lars

Comments

Thanks for this tool, Thomas. It worked great. For some reason, the following files could not be downloaded.

File #2, 8, 15, 51, 56, 58, 75, 88 and 115 in the order they exist in your Excel spreadsheet.

Did you have trouble with these too?

Emoticon

Thanks!

Dan

Posted by Dan Soares At 16:23:10 On 21.02.2008 | - Website -

Brilliant! Thanks so much.

Posted by Eric At 00:12:55 On 21.02.2008 | - Website -

Awesome, downloading all the mp3s now....will take a few hours because their site is slow!!!

Posted by Patrick Picard At 20:01:45 On 22.02.2008 | - Website -

Hi Dan,
I haven't noted the numbers, but I 'd problems with 9 files, too.

Posted by Thomas Bahn At 17:11:33 On 21.02.2008 | - Website -

Missing from the list:
134 Application Development Keynote

Cheers!

Posted by Lars Berntrop-Bos At 20:10:38 On 16.02.2008 | - Website -

The two-connection limit seems to apply only to the way Hans-Peter tried the downloads.
I have downloaded using several cmd files in parallel and that works with a bandwidth of 20-35 K/s.
So thanks again, Thomas!

Posted by Jens Polster At 15:32:22 On 17.02.2008 | - Website -

Excellent!

Posted by Lars Berntrop-Bos At 19:59:03 On 16.02.2008 | - Website -

Works like a charm!

It seems that the outgoing bandwidth per download is limited and only two downloads are allowed per machine. So splitting up the cmd file in two will at least speed up things a little.

Thanks Thomas!

Posted by Jens Polster At 20:34:55 On 16.02.2008 | - Website -

@Corey

thanks for the comment.
I've fixed the download. I broke it earlier with an update - slightly different file name Emoticon

Posted by Thomas Bahn At 10:14:18 On 17.02.2008 | - Website -

#10

Thanks!!

I tried to download the podcasts from the Lotusphere Offline Website, where there are available zipped to files greater than 1 GB each.

I finally gave up, as you are limited to only 2 connections at 50 KB/s and several downloads stopped (crashed) after more than 10 hours of download time.

And looking into the files I downloaded sucessfully I saw that they are named very useless and sorted into folders named by room and time the sessions took place.

Your solution is way better, thanks for the time you saved us!

Posted by Hans-Peter Kuessner At 13:20:25 On 17.02.2008 | - Website -

#11

I'm not able to download the zip file. I get this:

Error - Server message
HTTP Web Server: Item Not Found Exception

Posted by Corey At 08:18:24 On 17.02.2008 | - Website -

#12

I used the Free Download Manager FDM in Mozilla Firefox. With this tool, I had 3 concurrent downloads with 10 concurrent connections (altogether, not per download) on a 2 MBit ADSL line.

Posted by Thomas Bahn At 20:41:08 On 16.02.2008 | - Website -