Possible to restore access to online Flash streaming video? (not games)

[irishdroid35]

I'm a researcher studying broadcast media in Ireland - this is my first post here!

The deprecation of Adobe Flash has meant that one resource I rely on, the news archives of Irish TV station RTE, has recently been badly impacted. All pre-2013 archives of its news programmes now throw up a generic Flash error which I have not been able to get around. I've tried potential solutions like installing older versions of Flash, use of the Pale Moon browser with an older Flash player, alternative Flash players like Lightspark, Flash emulators like Ruffle, and tried tools like URL snooper to try and identify a video stream on a page to grab by some other means (no useful URLs are being identified). (I'm using a recent laptop running Windows 11)

I haven't been able to get any useful technical info on the issue from the station itself, who seem to be suggesting that the resources are now irretrievable and just blaming Flash for the issue. It's unclear to me if the actual video files are still on their servers or if they've done something on their end as well as Flash activating the kill-switch on their software. And it's not clear to me why videos after sometime around 2013 load up fine but videos before this simply fail to load. There are some threads on Irish forums from a decade ago describing ways of accessing videos from the RTE site using software to detect RTMP streams. The RTE online video player has been through various revisions since then but none of these have broken the older archival videos until the Flash closure.

I'm posting to ask if anyone could give me any pointers on the technical feasibility of looking into this further- are there other methods worth trying to try to restore access to these videos - assuming of course that they're still there and the issue is about bypassing Flash somehow.

As an example, here's a page containing a series of clips from a programme broadcast in 2011 which are non-functioning. Changing the page number at the end of the URL to a much lower number will take you to a post-2013 page where the videos run fine.

Link: https://www.rte.ie/news/player/six-one-news-web/2011/0605/#page=340


Any information would be great here - even just to know that there are no viable options to getting this to work. Thanks!

[october262]

I'm a researcher studying broadcast media in Ireland - this is my first post here!

The deprecation of Adobe Flash has meant that one resource I rely on, the news archives of Irish TV station RTE, has recently been badly impacted. All pre-2013 archives of its news programmes now throw up a generic Flash error which I have not been able to get around. I've tried potential solutions like installing older versions of Flash, use of the Pale Moon browser with an older Flash player, alternative Flash players like Lightspark, Flash emulators like Ruffle, and tried tools like URL snooper to try and identify a video stream on a page to grab by some other means (no useful URLs are being identified). (I'm using a recent laptop running Windows 11)

I haven't been able to get any useful technical info on the issue from the station itself, who seem to be suggesting that the resources are now irretrievable and just blaming Flash for the issue. It's unclear to me if the actual video files are still on their servers or if they've done something on their end as well as Flash activating the kill-switch on their software. And it's not clear to me why videos after sometime around 2013 load up fine but videos before this simply fail to load. There are some threads on Irish forums from a decade ago describing ways of accessing videos from the RTE site using software to detect RTMP streams. The RTE online video player has been through various revisions since then but none of these have broken the older archival videos until the Flash closure.

I'm posting to ask if anyone could give me any pointers on the technical feasibility of looking into this further- are there other methods worth trying to try to restore access to these videos - assuming of course that they're still there and the issue is about bypassing Flash somehow.

As an example, here's a page containing a series of clips from a programme broadcast in 2011 which are non-functioning. Changing the page number at the end of the URL to a much lower number will take you to a post-2013 page where the videos run fine.

Link: https://www.rte.ie/news/player/six-one-news-web/2011/0605/#page=340


Any information would be great here - even just to know that there are no viable options to getting this to work. Thanks!

try archive.org - https://archive.org/details/reeling-in-the-years-rte-tv