video with 1kb on BBC

[goalie 58]

When downloading this video from the BBC site, the download finished too fast and is less than 1kb.  The site probably has some protections but just putting this out there for workarounds in future releases...

Site: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p07d23t6/a-rental-service-for-lonely-people

Video DownloadHelper 7.3.6 running on "Firefox" pre-Quantum: actually Basilisk 2018.12.18 (32 bit)

No error messages.

[Graham Perrin]

Before you attempt the download, temporarily set a user agent (UA) override for the relevant domain – bbc.co.uk or bbc.com

Any number of UA strings might have the required effect. This one works for me:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Crazy Browser 1.0.5)

Remember to cease the override after you finish downloading.

Explanation

Taking a hint from a March 2017 post – <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/IpVytKrJQrA/b_QBOWwUAgAJ> – I visited:

BBC - HTML5 Player
https://www.bbc.co.uk/html5

There are some places where the HTML5 player won't work. These include:

• Windows XP
• Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1 or below
• Safari on MacOS El Capitan or older

The UA string above signifies Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) 6 on Windows XP. That's suitably inferior to the browser that I truly use (Waterfox Classic); low enough to trigger delivery of Flash media in lieu of HTML5.

With the override in place and the BBC test page reloaded, I still see:

We think this page has embedded the HTML5 player, as seen below:

– however proceeding with playback reveals the truth, Flash:



With Flash media served by the BBC, Video DownloadHelper can download a .flv file that can be played in applications such as VLC media player.

Apologies

To developers: I'm sorry for knocking off a star in my mid-2018 review. The linked item http://www.downloadhelper.net/support?place=msg%2Fvideo-downloadhelper-q-and-a%2F0c6nAeTpees%2F8kM_Rj8lCAAJ is no longer available, I see that arrangements for support have changed since then.

Now five stars https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/reviews/1456212/ and I'll add a written review in due course.

Rating the BBC

https://www.downloadhelper.net/asite/bbc

I chose five stars plus one star each for broken, high quality and informative. I mean, it's not really broken but when the workaround (Flash media) is not obvious, things might appear to be broken from the perspective of users of Video DownloadHelper.

Comparing https://web.archive.org/web/20181214001122/http://www.downloadhelper.net:80/asite/bbc (5.00/5) with https://web.archive.org/web/20191205103447/https://www.downloadhelper.net/asite/bbc (3.40/5) I suspect that the down-rating is a result of people (like me) lazily misunderstanding the limits of what can be done with e.g. HTML5.