This art­icle is for you if you’re a Cana­dian foot­ball fan, you don’t have cable TV, you use an oper­at­ing sys­tem which doesn’t run Microsoft Sil­ver­light (such as Linux) and you can’t afford to go out to the bar all the time to watch foot­ball games. I may have described only one per­son (myself), but just in case there’s another per­son out there, I will describe to you how to watch your foot­ball games. I should say that while I’m no law­yer, my under­stand­ing is that what I describe here could become illegal should Bill C-​​32 pass, and we all hope it won’t.

The first and most import­ant part is to install rtm­p­dump, a util­ity which you will use to actu­ally down­load the video stream. I’m using a rel­at­ively ancient ver­sion of rtm­p­dump and I don’t think it mat­ters par­tic­u­larly which ver­sion you use.

From there all that is needed is a way to get the rtmp URLs of the game you want. To use the script below, you give it a link to a game you want to down­load — some­thing of the form http://​watch​.tsn​.ca/​c​f​l​-​g​a​m​e​s​-​o​n​-​d​e​m​a​n​d​/​w​e​e​k​-​1​-​a​l​o​u​e​t​t​e​s​-​v​s​-​r​o​u​g​h​r​i​d​e​rs/ (one of the best foot­ball games I’ve seen in a long time, incidentally) — as an argu­ment. It then extracts the clip IDs for each quarter (includ­ing over­time, if needed), determ­ines the rtmp URL for each video clip, and down­loads the video files in sequence.

It’s worked well for me but there are cer­tainly no guar­an­tees about it. CTV could break it eas­ily if they so wanted (if you’re read­ing this, CTV, please don’t be mean­ies. Let’s be BFFs). The only unfor­tu­nate down­side to it is that CTV poten­tially loses out on some advert­ising rev­enue. My recom­mend­a­tion is to stare extra hard at the com­mer­cials to make up for it on the days you do go out to the bar to watch a game. Head­ing out to the sta­dium — at the very least whenever the Riders are in town — would also be a nice way to sup­port the league and TSN for put­ting games up online.