words

qik! before it’s too late! #indieweb

3 Comments

I’ve just seen that qik.com is finally going down. I did some work to download my videos last year soon after blip.tv torched my stuff.

I’m ashamed to say that I don’t seem to have documented the process. If I find anything, I’ll post it, but it went something like this – if you have better ways or you can see clunkiness in my approach, please let me know 🙂

Assumes you have some comfort using a Terminal – I basically used grep and wget

UPDATE:

You might find reading the rest of this useful to understand the process, but there’s a gist with the best instructions I can do here: https://gist.github.com/lloyddavis/9807117

replace NUM_PAGES with how many summary pages you have and YOUR_USERNAME with your username – so for me it was 8 and lloyddavis

This gets you just a list of all the individual URLs, not the downloads themselves, that’s another step, but this could help

The download URLs are tucked away in an individual page for each video – the URLs for these pages are in the summary pages you’ll see if you go to “My Videos”

each of your pages has a URL starting with http://qik.com/lloyddavis/videos?page=1

download all of them (I had 8 pages)

use grep to extract all the lines with “play-button” in them – that will give you a list of URLs for the individual Video pages (like qik.com/video/5394230 ) that contain the download link.

strip out the junk from these lines and use wget to download one html file for each video.

UPDATE: The trouble is though that you need to authenticate with the server to get at these – that’s addressed in the stuff on github

The download links are of the form:

http://media.qik.com/vod/mp4-download/4b6437b98836494eb0a7350054d1bd84?download

again, you can grep them out with the string “video-download”

put all these urls in a file and wget the heck out of them. Some won’t work, there were a few corrupted or empty as I remember.

3 thoughts on “qik! before it’s too late! #indieweb”

  1. Pingback: also anyone with better skillz than me, if you can… « Lloyd Davis

    1. Thanks Jason, I can’t see straight away whether you still need to click into every page or whether it spiders through all the links. In any case it also needs to recognise the download URL, which doesn’t have a file extension as a link to the media file.

      Still, do appreciate the thought, thank you.

      I’ve got mine and I know that I’ve helped Christian get the majority of his out, but a “Download all your shit” button would have been nicer.

      Lesson learned – won’t get fooled again…

Comments are closed.