Tech Forum

I am the STS for our Stake. I set up a Plex Media Server to stream videos straight from the network room instead of trying to stream from the internet over our T1x2. I'm currently going through the process of downloading all of the downloadable LDS Videos from the LDS.org website. Is there an index of all videos that I can set up a crawler to grab or do I just have to scrape the website and download everything? An index (or a simple REST API) would be very easy to crawl.

Currently the website requires a query to return a result. For example: doesn't work without the : after the video resource.

Is there an easier way to do this?

Keep in mind, I would like to be able to crawl the video service once a week to compare the live offerings against my local index so I can grab any new videos that are published.

Thank you in advance,

Ken Anderson

I feel your pain. Currently there are no plans to provide an index of all church content. There are discussions and a project proposed to try to make bulk downloads available. There is a lot of content and finding a way to make that media more accessible and downloadable is an effort that is being looked at. Thank you for the idea and effort you are going to make media available to your teachers and leaders.

I spent the better part of The Summer of 2012 downloading these categories... worst yet, the files are only validated with meta-data to run in Itunes (because who would ever do anything other than use an Apple Product) so I had to redo nearly everything for a Windows Server to crawl through the data to build all the Plex Menus - So, I definitely feel your pain... I've copied this core file-set for many clerks over the last couple years after they sent me a USB drive. Anyway... good luck, our Plex setup has been fairly successful.