France Televisions

Several TV channels are offering off-line replay modes. That’s great for me, as I’m not spending my time reading TV programs enough in advance to record what I would like to see later… It happens often that someone talks to me about a TV program the day after its broadcast…
too late…
or not with “replay TV”.

The main issue with this “service” is that programs remain available only a few days (< 1 week most of the time). I may not have enough time to watch it within the week, using this streaming feature. So I wanted to be able to download it, for later watching, the easiest way possible…

For France Television (F2, F3, F4, F5, FÔ), the service is called “pluzz.tv”.
And the software to get on your Ubuntu distribution (or any Linux distribution) is pluzzdl.

This program seems to be part of a bigger one, but not under development anymore. You can refer to their Google code page : tvdownloader.

Installation

Manual installation of pluzzdl is quite easy:
cd /var/tmp
git clone https://github.com/ziirish/pluzzdl
cd pluzzdl
make
sudo make install

Now, if you want to install it for all users on your system (I recommand this option), you need to “adjust” a little bit the launching script (you also need to adjust it even if you keep it only for you…):
cd /var/tmp
sudo cp -rp pluzzdl /usr/local/.

and modify the pluzzdl script file to refer to the new location of the program: sudo vi `which pluzzdl` and provide the full path to pluzzdl directory in the “MAIN” variable: MAIN=”/usr/local/pluzzdl/src/main.py”

Then I also had to install a python library which was not on my distribution by default (Ubuntu 14.04):
sudo apt-get install python-beautifulsoup

That’s it !

Usage

You can test your installation:
[/var/tmp]$ pluzzdl --version
pluzzdl 0.9.4


Don’t hesitate to use the “man” page, but options are very limited and simple to understand (I used the -b option to see things progressing ; one can also use the -t option to download sub-titles).
In order to download the TV program you are looking for, you need its URL (to fetch from France Television site: http://pluzz.francetv.fr/).
Then, simply move to the directory (cd ~/Videos/) where you want to download your video and run:
pluzzdl -b pluzzdl -b http://pluzz.francetv.fr/videos/xxxxxxxx.html
(use the URL you identified on the France Television web site, of course)

Many thanks to the developers !