Microsoft Teams - How to Download a View-Only Teams Meeting Recorded Video

 

Intro:

I had asked for a video to be recorded with during an interaction with a vendor so I could reference it later. Upon receiving the email with the link I quickly realized you can't download it locally to save. There's another caveat:

According to this post (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/how-to-manage-microsoft-teams-meeting-recording-auto-expiration/ba-p/3053035), new video recordings will automatically expire 60 days after they are recorded if no action is taken, except for A1 (education license) users who will receive a max 30-day default setting.

Since we have no clue what other admins have set as the default time expiration, we need a way to download a copy of the video to reference in the future asap. Microsoft presents the video as view-only and it cannot be downloaded.

Solution:

1. Open Chrome (or the browser of your choice) and load the page with the video that you want to download.
2. Open page inspector (Ctrl + Shift + C).
3. Click on the Network tab.
4. Type "videomanifest" where it says “Filter URLs“.
5. Press F5 to refresh the page.
6. When the page reloads, copy the file URL. See below:

Next we'll use FFmpeg to download the video from the URL above:

ffmpeg -i "https://videomanifest_url" -codec copy output.mp4

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ffmpeg Syntax for NVR Footage

 

Intro:

Occasionally from time to time I'm asked to pull video footage from NVR systems and send this off to either the customer or police departments. Honeywell systems will dump this footage as ".asf" files and for some reason it's not playable once directly uploaded to Google Drive. 

You also can't speed up the footage without artifacts starting to appear around 7-10x speed and getting worse with higher speeds around 15x. If re-encoded to the container MKV, it's playable on Google Drive. No clue why and I don't have time to figure it out at the moment. I may come back to this in a future article.

ffmpeg Syntax:

Combine Multiple Files:

• CMD
• CD to directory with ASF files to be combined.
• Create a list of files to be combined and save them to "list.txt".
• (echo file 'first file.asf' & echo file 'second file.asf' )>list.txt

• To make things easy, CD to the directory of "ffmpeg.exe".
• Run ffmpeg, concatenating each file in succession found in "list.txt", and save to a single "output.mp4" file.
• ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat -i C:\temp\list.txt -c copy output.asf
• C:\temp\list.txt references must exist in C:\temp\
• output.asf is generated in ffmpeg directory
• make output file extension same as input then convert to MKV in Handbrake
• output.xxx can be .asf, .mp4, or mkv

Convert MP4 to MKV Container:

• Change the input file and output file names
• ffmpeg -i "INPUT FILE.mp4" "OUTPUT FILE.mkv"

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