Get direct link videos from Vimeo in PHP

Question

I want a direct link to videos from Vimeo with a PHP script. I managed to find them manually, but my PHP script does not work. Here is the initiative: For example I took this video: http://vimeo.com/22439234

When you go on the page, Vimeo generates a signature associated with the current timestamp and this video. This information is stored in a JavaScript variable, around line 520 just after: window.addEvent ('domready', function () {

Then when you click Play, the HTML5 player reads this variable and sends an HTTP request:

http:// player.vimeo.com/play_redirect?clip_id=37111719&sig={SIGNATURE}&time={TIMESTAMP}&quality=sd&codecs=H264,VP8,VP6&type=moogaloop_local&embed_location=

But it also works with:

http:// player.vimeo.com/play_redirect?clip_id=37111719&sig={SIGNATURE}&time={TIMESTAMP}&quality=sd

If this URL does not open with the IP address that opened http://vimeo.com/22439234, this returns the HTTP code 200 with an error message.

If this URL is opened with the correct IP address, the header "Location" redirects to link to the video file: http://av.vimeo.com/XXX/XX/XXXX.mp4?aksessionid=XXXX&token=XXXXX_XXXXXXXXX

When I build this link http://player.vimeo.com/play_redirect?... manually ("right click"> "source code"> "line 520") it works.

But with PHP and regex it returns the HTTP code 200 with an error message.

Why ?

From my observations, Vimeo does not check the headers of the HTTP request for http:// player.vimeo.com/play_redirect?... GET, HEAD, with cookies, without cookies, referrer etc. ... does not change.

With PHP, I use the function file_get_contents() and get_headers().

    <?php
    function getVimeo($id) {

    $content = file_get_contents('http://vimeo.com/'.$id);

    if (preg_match('#document\.getElementById\(\'player_(.+)\n#i', $content, $scriptBlock) == 0)
        return 1;

    preg_match('#"timestamp":([0-9]+)#i', $scriptBlock[1], $matches);
    $timestamp = $matches[1];
    preg_match('#"signature":"([a-z0-9]+)"#i', $scriptBlock[1], $matches);
    $signature = $matches[1];

    $url = 'http://player.vimeo.com/play_redirect?clip_id='.$id.'&sig='.$signature.'&time='.$timestamp.'&quality=sd';

    print_r(get_headers($url, 1));
    }

Answer 1

Try add a valid user-agent to headers for an each request. For this you must use cURL or HttpRequest instead file_get_contents().

After such manipulations I got a working link for downloading the video file.

Here my code:

function getVimeo($id) {
    // get page with a player
    $queryResult = httpQuery('http://vimeo.com/' . $id);
    $content = $queryResult['content'];

    if (preg_match('#document\.getElementById\(\'player_(.+)\n#i', $content, $scriptBlock) == 0)
        return 1;

    preg_match('#"timestamp":([0-9]+)#i', $scriptBlock[1], $matches);
    $timestamp = $matches[1];
    preg_match('#"signature":"([a-z0-9]+)"#i', $scriptBlock[1], $matches);
    $signature = $matches[1];

    $url = 'http://player.vimeo.com/play_redirect?clip_id=' . $id . '&sig=' . $signature . '&time=' . $timestamp . '&quality=sd';

    // make the request for getting a video url
    #print_r(get_headers($url, 1));
    $finalQuery = httpQuery($url);
    return $finalQuery['redirect_url'];
}
// make queries via CURL
function httpQuery($url) {
    $options = array(
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT => 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/12.04 Chromium/18.0.1025.168 Chrome/18.0.1025.168 Safari/535.19',
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    );
    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
    $content = curl_exec($ch);
    $info = curl_getinfo($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    $result = $info;
    $result['content'] = $content;

    return $result;
}

echo getVimeo(22439234);

Answer 2

The algorithm looks like this:

• Input data: vimeoUrl.
• content = getRemoteContent(vimeoUrl).
• Parse content to find and extract the value from data-config-url attribute.
• Navigate to data-config-url and load the content as JSON Object: $video = json_decode($this->getRemoteContent($video->getAttribute('data-config-url')));
• Return $video->request->files->h264->sd->url — this will return a direct link for SD quality video.

Here is my simple class, that working for this moment.

class VideoController
{

    /**
     * @var array Vimeo video quality priority
     */
    public $vimeoQualityPrioritet = array('sd', 'hd', 'mobile');

    /**
     * @var string Vimeo video codec priority
     */
    public $vimeoVideoCodec = 'h264';

    /**
     * Get direct URL to Vimeo video file
     * 
     * @param string $url to video on Vimeo
     * @return string file URL
     */
    public function getVimeoDirectUrl($url)
    {
        $result = '';
        $videoInfo = $this->getVimeoVideoInfo($url);
        if ($videoInfo && $videoObject = $this->getVimeoQualityVideo($videoInfo->request->files))
        {
            $result = $videoObject->url;
        }
        return $result;
    }

    /**
     * Get Vimeo video info
     * 
     * @param string $url to video on Vimeo
     * @return \stdClass|null result
     */
    public function getVimeoVideoInfo($url)
    {
        $videoInfo = null;
        $page = $this->getRemoteContent($url);
        $dom = new \DOMDocument("1.0", "utf-8");
        libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
        $dom->loadHTML('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "\n" . $page);
        $xPath = new \DOMXpath($dom);
        $video = $xPath->query('//div[@data-config-url]');
        if ($video)
        {
            $videoObj = json_decode($this->getRemoteContent($video->item(0)->getAttribute('data-config-url')));
            if (!property_exists($videoObj, 'message'))
            {
                $videoInfo = $videoObj;
            }
        }
        return $videoInfo;
    }

    /**
     * Get vimeo video object
     * 
     * @param stdClass $files object of Vimeo files
     * @return stdClass Video file object
     */
    public function getVimeoQualityVideo($files)
    {
        $video = null;
        if (!property_exists($files, $this->vimeoVideoCodec) && count($files->codecs))
        {
            $this->vimeoVideoCodec = array_shift($files->codecs);
        }
        $codecFiles = $files->{$this->vimeoVideoCodec};
        foreach ($this->vimeoQualityPrioritet as $quality)
        {
            if (property_exists($codecFiles, $quality))
            {
                $video = $codecFiles->{$quality};
                break;
            }
        }
        if (!$video)
        {
            foreach (get_object_vars($codecFiles) as $file)
            {
                $video = $file;
                break;
            }
        }
        return $video;
    }

    /**
     * Get remote content by URL
     * 
     * @param string $url remote page URL
     * @return string result content
     */
    public function getRemoteContent($url)
    {
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'spider');
        $content = curl_exec($ch);

        curl_close($ch);

        return $content;
    }

}

Using:

$video = new VideoController;
var_dump($video->getVimeoDirectUrl('http://vimeo.com/90747156'));