Greasemonkey script for TVNZ ondemand

April 22, 2008

(Apologies if you've seen this on PAS already).

I've recently had a bit of a tinker with writing my own Greasemonkey script for Firefox which links directly to the flash video (FLV) files on the TVNZ ondemand site. This means instead of poring through your browser cache, you can actually download the files directly to whatever folder and watch them later on. Allegedly this might actually get around the geo-restrictions that stop ex-pats overseas watching it, but I couldn't possibly comment for obvious reasons.

FLV files can be watched in VLC which, of course, you're using as your default video player.

I haven't managed to test this on as many clients as I would have liked but it appears to work in Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. The resultant page should look something like this.

This was originally written with Media 7 in mind but it appears to work on all the "free" shows on TVNZ ondemand (e.g. recent episodes of Shortland Street) so I've changed the @includes to, erm, include all of the TVNZ show "skins". Let me know whether you have any issues with it.

Edit: on consideration, it would probably help if I linked to the user script in question.

Edit #2: alternatively, download it from userscripts.org.

Posted by davidr at April 22, 2008 12:21 PM