How can I find download links for vimeo videos?

Question

I saw that today vimeo changed the way they are streaming the videos and I can't stream their videos anymore. I saw that when I generate the link to the video, which was for example:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop/play/clip:6649390/1eab2a25f30f1aadaf5e306d0f40fd6c/1292498602/?q=hd

It's redirecting me to a page saying "Permission denied". I tried using curl, but without any success. I sniffed the traffic and I saw that it's streaming from something like:

http://av.vimeo.com/02047/623/34209065.mp4?token=1292496582_34de09a6d13212cf26af08357d311c30

Does anybody know how to get the working URL to the video file?

The way I'm getting the videos at the moment is:

1. Choose link http://vimeo.com/video_id.
2. Get only the video_id.
3. Get the XML for the video http://vimeo.com/moogaloop/load/clip:video_id;.

4. parse the XML and find the necessary information:

   • request_signature
   • request_signature_expires
   • isHD

5. Generate the link:

   $video_link = "http://vimeo.com/moogaloop/play/clip:".$video_id."/".$request_signature."/".$request_signature_expires."/?q=".$quality."";
   

If I do this manually through the browser it works, but if I do it through the script it doesn't.

Answer 1

After spending a few hours on finding out how I can get the direct link to vimeo I found a good solution. So here are the steps for the users who want to download and stream video src directly from vimeo. Keep in mind that they block all IP addresses and probably hosts which are downloading the videos in this way, so I just stopped using their services and I will never use them again :).

Steps to get the video sources:

1. choose link http://vimeo.com/video_id
2. get only the video_id
3. get the xml for the video http://vimeo.com/moogaloop/load/clip:video_id;

4. parse the xml and I find the necessary information I need:

   • request_signature
   • request_signature_expires
   • isHD

5. Then I generate the link:

   $video_link = "http://vimeo.com/moogaloop/play/clip:".$video_id."/".$request_signature."/".$request_signature_expires."/?q=".$quality."";
   

6. Then if you are php dev, you call wget command through exec in this way

   exec("wget -b '$video_link' -a 'wget.log' -O -");

7. Then you read the log and find out the link you are looking for. You can simply parse the log file. The direct link is between "Location: " and "[following]"

8. You return the direct link and clean the log file :)

NOTE: keep in mind again that this won't work forever. Sooner or later they will block your ip :).