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@extratone
Created March 24, 2021 13:39
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An ongoing document for (former) Periscope users detailing all available means of preserving/scraping data and media from psp.tv.

Periscope Preservation

An ongoing document for (former) Periscope users detailing all available means of preserving/scraping data and media from psp.tv.

The official announcement of Periscope's demise was posted on their Medium blog on December 15th, 2020.

It states:

Broadcasts that were shared to Twitter will live on as replays, and all broadcasters will be able to download an archive of their Periscope broadcasts and data before the app is removed in March 2021.

Thanks to a brief series of Tweets from @TwitterSupport, we know the app is going to be removed from the app store on March 31st. (Which is in 8 days, atm.)

However, the hyperlink referenced for users to find "more info… about what will happen to your Super Hearts and broadcasts, how you can go live on Twitter going forward, and more" (https://help.twitter.com/using-twitter/periscope-faq) is currently broken as of Mar 24, 2021 at 08:20 (CST.) I have posted replies on both Medium and Twitter pinging the relevant accounts I could find.

Given the above pullquote from the blog post, this means Twitter/Periscope has 8 days to enable users to download "an archive of their Periscope broadcasts and data," but…

The method for downloading "broadcasts and data" as documented by Twitter/Periscope does not currently work

  • Youtube-dl supports downloading Periscope broadcasts and is by far the best method I have discovered. (It even saves them as a .mp4 file with 0 configuration, at the moment.)
  • Scopedown is another, tried-and-true method of scraping full Periscope broadcasts in their native format, but will eventually obstruct you with a paywall.
  • The page all current Periscope documentation eventually points you to (https://www.pscp.tv/account/your-data) in order to "download your data" currently results only in a virtually useless .JSON file (it only includes broadcast IDs and some bewildering timestamp-related data.)

Any/all thoughts/feedback/corrections/updates would be deeply appreciated here on Github, by email, Twitter, or any other social platform.

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extratone commented Mar 25, 2021

image

Update!!
The tool finally worked for me! After months of not returning anything, it returned a .JSON file as well as the crude table above with download links to the .ts files.

I would advise you copy this table and post it into a blank Excel workbook (or whatever spreadsheet/database software you may have on hand) immediately before you begin downloading the videos so that you have an ennumerated list of hyperlinks to work with, at the very least.

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