While the idea behind the ZDF Mediathek is
not so bad at all, the actual implementation is a pain in the ass -
especially the flash version of the website, which causes my
Firefox to crash again and again...
So I tried the HTML version of the site, which has two major
advantages:
1.) Firefox doesn't crash anymore and
2.) one can watch the videos with any external program like vlc or
mplayer.
However, there's still a huge drawback: The videos are streamed via
the Real-Time
Streaming Protocol or the Microsoft
Media Server Protocol, so basic operations like
fast-forwarding, rewinding or pausing should be avoided.
Additionally, as no (significant) buffering is performed, your
internet connection will be in use for the whole runtime of a
video, limiting other online activities.
Looking for an easy solution for this, I checked mplayer's manpage
and found the -dumpstream option. The rest was some
elementary bash scripting:
mplayer -dumpfile "$(date +%y_%m_%d_%H_%M.dump)" -dumpstream "$(curl -s "$(curl -s "$LINK" | egrep "<li>DSL\s*2000\s*<a href=.*asx" | sed -r 's#.*href="([^"]+)".*#\1#')" | egrep -o 'mms://[^"]+')"This will save any(?) video from the Mediathek to a local file called *current_date*.dump. If you didn't figure it out by yourself, $LINK must be set to / replaced by the actual URL pointing to your video (you'll need the URL to the HTML version, or do some additional preprocessing first).