Desktop downloader for Giant Bomb videos?

While I trust Jeff’s statement that GB’s going to be sticking around in some new form, I intend to back up a lot of my favorite old premium series just in case. Are there any desktop programs that y’all would recommend for doing easy downloading of GB videos, in the style of phone apps like Bomb Cyclone?

Yeah I would like some kind of batch downloader. I once saw on Reddit someone wrote a script but I could never get it to work. Downloading over a hundred episodes of the P4 endurance run would be so time consuming.

If someone has a solution, I'd love to hear it.

I'm not sure what percentage of GB videos have been archived to youtube, but it seems to be pretty high. If you don't mind ripping vids from there, there are tools with the features you're looking for.

@frytup: I'm guessing premium video series are the ones people are going to want to download, but I'll check that out for the youtube stuff.

I agree. this makes me want to download certain videos that I will rewatch like UPF or E3 content.

I download new videos every night using a python script I found online. It should work to download archived videos. You can run it at night using task scheduler in windows and the script will keep track of what videos or podcasts you have already downloaded.

https://arachnoid.com/python/PodcastRetriever/index.html

I just plug in the necessary rss feeds from the website. I currently use:

https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/feed/high/?api_key= (your api key)

This downloads a 720p version. I will check to see if there are any questions that I can answer based on my usage.

@ranchermatt: Cheers, I’ll give this a shot when I’m off work.

not tried myself but i would imagine something like jdownloader would possibly work with the site , i've used to on other sites for various things over the years.it can be a but clunky but still effective usually.

@alistercat: True, but there seems to be a good bit of premium content there. I was just watching the Shenmue run today, for instance.

Someone on Reddit shared this tool for getting GB videos. Not perfect but apparently it works: https://github.com/lightpohl/gb-dl/blob/main/README.md

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GB ending would be one thing. Losing all my favorite GB videos I rewatch every year would be just be devastating. Those things really are a constant source of joy that keep giving when I need them.

I dont know what's realistic here. I read on Reddit there is something like 31 TB of GB videos. No way Jeff or even the community could host that out of passion. Even if Jeff was given the go ahead to post those on YouTube, they would be banned for content. And then who would even do the effort of posting them there? It's a mess.

It's a huge pain but I may start downloading my favorite premium videos. I really hope Jeff gives as much of a go ahead as possible on this stuff should it start to go away. My fear is that he's part of a big machine and this decision may come fast and swift where even he doesn't have much time to get a message out.

Not to spread FUD but this should be a wake up call. If you don't think all these videos will forever disappear, you are WRONG. This is what happened to Screened which was essentially part of Giant Bomb. Once it closed, all the videos were lost to time including many videos featuring Giant Bomb staff. Rorie and Alex didn't care to back any of it up and apparently the community didn't either. Hopefully it's different this time.

I've begun saving some of my favorite videos. I hope it doesn't end that way, but I'm not taking chances. As dumb as this might sound, Giant Bomb's content means as much to me as something like Star Wars does, and boy do I love me some Star Wars. The moment I got my first credit card, the first thing I did was subscribe to Giant Bomb. The idea of losing decades worth of amazing video/podcast content makes me sick, and while I can't save everything you best damn well know I'll do my best.

For those worried that sites like Giant Bomb might disappear or purge old content, a friendly reminder that the Internet Archive wants to backup everything.

They have a lot of GB content (presumably not premium videos though), for example: https://archive.org/details/@gbql

Good news on this front. This channel popped up a few years back: The Screened Archive on Youtube

Not everything's there but a fairly big chunk of it is.

That's kind of the issue though and also with Screened: The stuff I loved the most is premium content and it's the hardest to host (long runtimes, tons of copywritten stuff).

I think I came across that Screened channel before. Doesn't have much but what a weird 2010 time capsule it is. I really wanted to see that Dave Snider defending Lady in the Water for 2 hours video. Not sure why lol.

I made a video downloader a while ago. It doesn't have a gui but it's SUPER easy to run. Just open the folder you download it into in command line and type "python3 getVideos.py"

What it does is gets a video detail, downloads the video, saves the json data for that video, then gets the next video... and repeats that forever until all videos are grabbed.

Screenshot of progress:

It's a bit slapped together and could use some extra work, but you can grab it here:

https://github.com/theshaneobrien/gb-video-mass-downloader

Happy to accept any improvements into it too.

@finstern: This is awesome. Is there an easy way to filter it to a specific series instead of all premium vids? I am extremely not a coder but I'm good at find-and-replace.

Also, FYI to anyone who tries this, I think the API has a soft limit on daily downloads so tread carefully.

EDIT: Also the documentation makes it look like it's only grabbing the highest quality video...is there an easy way to restrict it to a specific quality instead of always looking for the highest? I am not blessed with a 100TB NAS for storage purposes, alas.

Guys, don't panic. Do you think the man that has copies of Batman on VHS somewhere on his basement doesn't know the value of preservation?

There will be a way. Because Giant Bomb finds a way.

@banefirelord: you'd have to figure out what the category number is... like i know "Trailers" is Category number 7, but unsure of the rest

if you change line 23 in that script:

"filters = "&filter=premium:true""

to

filters = "&filter=video_categories=7"

and run it, it will only download Trailers

To figure out the trailers category I used the following url:

https://www.giantbomb.com/api/video/[guid]/?api_key=[YOUR API KEY]

took the GUID from Yooka Laylee trailer

https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/e3-2019-yooka-laylee-returns-with-a-different-styl/2300-14313/

which left me with

https://www.giantbomb.com/api/video/2300-14313/?api_key=[YOUR API KEY]

If you visit that page in your browser you can see the category id:

You can do the same with video_show, so for example if you wanted to grab all of Breakfast and Ben / Jan 'n' Juice:
Take a random episode GUID and put it in the URL:

https://www.giantbomb.com/api/video/2970-21017/?api_key=[YOUR API KEY]

so in that case you'd change line 23 to

filters = "&filter=video_show=74"

and it will grab every episode of a particular show... it looks a bit technical, but it's the only way I know to get the Show / Category id.

The problem with selecting a specific quality of video is not all videos have all qualities available, for example, newer videos have hd_url, but some older ones only have low, most have low and high

@finstern: Thanks! Looks straightforward enough.

I looked into the available options yesterday. This one (https://github.com/lightpohl/gb-dl/blob/main/README.md) seems like the most stable/robust option, but has two, fairly large caveats, beyond not being very user friendly.

1. The video number is in descending order, meaning that video number 0 is referencing the newest video. That's problematic for a few reasons, for example if a new video is added, the entire list gets shifted and you might lose track. If it were in the opposite order, 0 would always be the first, 1 would always be the second, etc.

2. It doesn't have any automated way of downloading videos in bulk as far as I can tell. It does have an example script in JS to accomplish that, but it relies on the user to manually determine the number of videos, name of the show, etc. Anyone who's not at least somewhat familiar with programming will probably have a hard time with it.

I've been thinking about contributing to the project to reverse the order to fix the first point (it's a very easy fix) as well as writing a script to simplify per-show archiving if there's enough demand. If not and you have a little programming know-how, this seems the way to go.

I'm not sure if this is a solution. I been using Internet Download Manager for nearly 20 years at this point for batch downloads. You're able to download just about any file type and even site rips of pictures and videos as long as you give the application your credentials you can download tons of content that is behind the paywall.

Some duder made GB-Video-Grabber that I'd recommend and it works quite well for bulk downloads however it will only download in highest quality (you can modify the source code though and build a version for another quality).

It lets you filter by show id and I posted a list of the significant ones in the thread at the time:

https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/api-developers-3017/terminal-application-for-grabbing-latest-videos-1885649/

For non-coders you can find the binary executables here:

https://github.com/benmurden/GB-Video-Grabber/releases

"GB-Video-Grabber_0.2.1_Windows_x86_64.zip" is probably what you're looking for.

@thesquarepear: This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

While I agree that's a startling number, just speaking for myself I've been downloading the highest-quality version of their files available for the last...ten years, literally. I don't have everything, and in the last year I definitely lagged behind (the Lockdown 2020 output was...immense, I'm truly in awe), but I'd be willing to bet there are a decent number of similarly-minded lurking duders with gigantic media servers doing the exact same thing. So, like, don't worry, we're all on it. Plus as other people said, Vinny and Drew have talked about their archiving methods in the past (literally unplugging entire NAS units and putting them aside so they can be spun up at a moment's notice), and Jeff ain't no fool. At least not in this way (ilu Jeff). Don't stress, somehow or other this stuff will be saved and will always be able to be accessed (though if you wanna help, please absolutely download your favorites yourself).

Not to be a downer either; I'm also still reeling from the news, just completely rocked and in my feelings. But Jeff said the site will continue, and New Blood has brought us Austin, Jason, Dan, Abby, Jan, technically Ben wasn't Staff back when he was first an intern so I'll count him as New Blood...and Patrick was the OG New Guy. I know not everyone's a fan of every new person, but some of the new people have become my absolute favorite people online, and I'm grateful for that. So I'll hold hope in my heart that I'll get to know some new favorites.

...But I'm still archiving all the old videos, because The Man can't take my memories from me!

@thebrainninja: Noice! I know there have been developing tech for self-hosted YouTube solutions. Maybe in coming years hosting premium content will be easier, should that ever be necessary. Hopefully, Jeff gives clarity on what the future of this stuff looks like.

I think a GB reboot would be cool. GB 3.0 or something (the GB East split when Vinny left felt like GB 2.0). Leo Vader recently said on MinnMax that we was interviewed by GB, I assume for the role Ben got. He's amazing. I don't think he'd ever join GB now but it goes to show how good Jeff and Co. are at finding new talent.

@thesquarepear: would you mind explaining how you get the show number for show names? is the "#showname" important or is that just a comment for organisation sake?

Also I can't download it all at once but it doesn't recognise already downloaded episodes so it tries to get them again. I know you didn't make it but you seem to understand how it works.

@alistercat: I got them from the "id" part of the results from the API endpoint "video_shows".

showname is just a comment

I think it should recognise stuff that's already downloaded if it has the same naming from that tool.

I might compile the full list of show id's later tonight but I got work first.

@thesquarepear: Thank you for the response. I figured a few things out, and it seems like the issue I'm having is with "seasons". Shows like Metal Gear and Endurance Run are broken up in such a way that the script will only download the latest season and stop. My knowledge ends here. I tried looking at the API documentation but no mention of seasons, and I'm pretty much out of my depth.

Don't worry about going out of your way to help me though, you've done more than enough :)

@alistercat: I managed to get all seasons of Metal Gear Scanlon as far as I recall but I did do it in several runs aborting and resuming.

You would need to increment offset by 100's for Endurance Run and other +100 episode shows (like Lockdown 2020).

E.g. start with "offset: 0" then "offset: 100", "offset: 200" and so on.

Anyways glad I could help :) The increments could probably be programmed into the tool by TigerDX however I can perfectly understand if he moved on to other hobby projects.

I compiled the unfiltered show id's anyways so might as well post them if anyone might need them:

@thesquarepear: Thank you very much. That's super generous of you. You're right, I'm not having the problem with Metal Gear. It's just the ER. If I had to guess it's because it's pulling the HD id, and only Shenmue is in HD. For the other 4 endurance runs I'd need to change the quality to high, but unsure how to do that.

@alistercat: Do you still have a problem with that? I am currently in the process of backing up premium giantbomb (I am from Russia, so no more giantbomb for me after the current subscription ends). Therefore I have rebuilt benmurden's grabber with the addition of chryling's quality option, you can currently choose to download in low/high/HQ quality. If needed be, I might be able to add other options as well (although I have never used GBs API before).

@dnofm: Yes I still have this problem. I check the github every now and again but no updates and I don't know what I'm doing. If you could PM me your advice I would be very happy.

@alistercat:

A few solutions:

1) Just download the build I made (it's for windows). Here is the link on my google drive https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B73d6QAQhClcqicS0MgrE7K68HlFQDiq/view?usp=sharing

Although, I am not sure that people nowadays trust some random links from Russia, I get it :) Also if you are a unix user, you are in tough luck. Goto 2.

2) If you want to build the file yourself.

• Download all the files from the benmurden's master branch github.
• Open the "pull requests" tab on the same github, there is one by chrilyng. He actually added a few lines that add the ability to change the quality of download. What you need is the tab "files changed".
• Copy his version of gbDownloader.go and replace the contents of the previous (benmurden's) file.
• Compile it into a single exectuable by any golang compiler (I never used go language previously, so I just used the first available in google "goland").
• What you also might wanna do (at least I did in my version): change the "age:XXX" to age:3000 in two lines "decor.EwmaETA" and "decor.EwmaSpeed". This way the script averages the speed over longer periods, you can actually realistically judge how long will it take to download stuff (benmurden's just fluctuates/jumps too much).

How to use:

The same as before, but you can add the line "quality :0/1/2" to the "config.yaml" file. 0 means low quality, 1 - high, 2 - HQ. It defaults to HQ.

@dnofm: Excellent. Thank you. I have downloaded your compiled version as I trust you though as you say, randomly downloading stuff off the internet from strangers is usually a bad idea.

This should allow me to back up the remainder of the shows that I want! Good luck with your own archiving.