Downloading Brightcove Videos

Got some Brightcove webinars from work that I need to download, but finding it quite challenging. Most of the blog posts talk about disabling Flash, enabling developer tools, then setting device emulation and/or user-agent spoofing to Apple iPad.

Logic here is that Brightcove typically transports videos via Flash, as this makes saving videos for offline very difficult. By spoofing the device as an Apple iPad, the theory is that the Brightcove player should fallback to HTML5 mode and we should then be able to save the file as mp4.
So the steps are:

1. Disable Flash via chrome://plugins
2. Go to Developer Tools (Ctrl-Shft-I), and switch to Apple iPad mode.
3. Go to Network tab and filter for mp4.
4. Reload the page (F5) and wait for the mp4 link to show up.

What I noticed is that disabling the Flash plug-in doesn’t really help. I’m not seeing any mp4 URL. Other blog posts talk about rtmp hacking. Again, I don’t see any reference to rtmp on the Network tab.

Now that I think about it, Brightcove probably doesn’t even use Flash anymore, as almost everyone else is now using HTML5 for video streaming. A closer look at the network traffic shows that the Brightcove player is sending over binary blobs of video using xhr (XMLHttpRequest/Response). It’s possible that the player is not falling back to mp4 mode because it assumes the Apple iPad (and Safari) can handle HTML5 XHR. To test my theory, I switched the device emulation to Google Nexus 4, and this time the tricked worked just fine – even without disabling Flash. On the Network tab, I can see the mp4 link, which can be copied and pasted to your favourite downloader.

While this worked for now, there’s no telling what Brightcove might come up next. For reference, below are some blog posts on what other people have done.

Using rtmp:
http://johntantalo.com/blog/extracting-video-from-brightcove-player-with-rtmpdump/
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/354508-Brightcove
http://www.benfrancom.com/2016/03/17/download-brightcove-videos.html
http://mrbluecoat.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/download-brightcove-videos-tutorial.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2ro9vn/need_help_downloading_embedded_video/

Using mp4 fallback:
http://grumblesmeckerecke.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/how-to-download-brightcove-videos.html
http://words.bombast.net/download-brightcove-videos/
http://www.mikewebguy.com/2013/08/20/save-brightcove-videos-from-google-chrome/
https://tjkelly.com/blog/how-to-download-brightcove-video/