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GVP Download: A quick and dirty Ruby script to download Google Videos

So Google Video has a bunch of really awesome content, but watching it with Flash is a CPU-hogging, lowest-common-denominator experience. So here’s a quick script to go from video URL to watchable AVI:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "open-uri"

puts "Downloading descriptor file..."
gvp_id = ARGV[0].gsub(/\D/, “”)
gvp_doc = open(”http://video.google.com/videogvp/gvp-download.gvp?docid=#{gvp_id}”).read.split(”\\n”)

gvp_doc.find { |x| x =~ /^url:(.*)$/ }
gvp_movie_url = $1.gsub(/&/, ‘\\\\\\&’).gsub(/\\?/, ‘\\\\\\?’)

gvp_doc.find { |x| x =~ /^title:(.*)$/ }
gvp_title = $1

puts “Downloading \”#{gvp_title}\”…”
puts “wget -O #{(gvp_title + “.avi”).inspect} #{gvp_movie_url}”

If you want to use curl instead of wget, change the last line of code.

This probably violates some terms of use, so this is only a intellectual demonstration of the wonderment and possibilitude of the programmablemated webernet.

BTW, it’s amazing how much I had to escape things to pass the right values through Wordpress, Ruby’s weird-ass string escaping, and finally Bash. Lots of backslashes.