Issues playing the Paralympics' opening ceremony video on an external HDTV?

TidBITS Talk
1

Hello,

Is anyone else having problems playing NBC.com web site’s Watch Replay: World Feed: 2024 Paris Paralympics Opening Ceremony - NBC.com Paralympics’ opening ceremony video onto a HDTV from an 2020 13" Intel MacBook Pro (macOS Ventura)? Video is either black or frozen. I can hear its audio.

Is NBC.com doing copy protection or something with it? I tried Chrome, Firefox, and Safari web browsers. I even tried direct HDMI cable connection and through ATV 4K (2nd gen.). I don’t even get an AirPlay option to any ATV 4K with Safari web browser! I have no problems with YouTube.com, DailyMotion.com, etc. Everything is updated. :(

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)

2

I am reading and answering.

You might want to look into the Mac video download utility Downie and, possibly, the video encoding program Handbrake.

Downie makes downloading video from many websites easy. Handbrake, while not as easy to use as Downie, is a good way to change a video from one format (say, a YouTube stream) to another (for example, the format used by AppleTV’s).

I’ve been a highly satisfied, long time user of both programs. Downie’s developer is especially responsive and conscientious.

3

Thanks, but I prefer to stream it.

4

Would either of these be useful for downloading standard YouTube videos? They’ve made it so hard lately

5

yt-dlp if you know command line.GitHub - yt-dlp/yt-dlp: A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader

1 Like
6

Downie, yes. Handbrake, no. In any case, Downie offers a free trial so you can see if it suits your needs before spending any $$$.

7

I used to use ViDL for Mac as a GUI front-end to youtube-dl, but it stopped working with Monterey. Now any action results in error:

env:
python: No such file or directory

I suspect it is because Monterey doesn’t include python2.

I tried to fix it with links to python3 but nothing I did worked.

Does anyone know how to fix it, or an alternative? The developer is not responsive.

8

You could try running it in a VM if your computer supports it.

I still use youtube-dl on a Catalina system with Terminal and have never tried ViDL.

9

Is this for downloading videos? For that I use ClipGrab

1 Like