I have been fascinated by live camera streams showing the streets of England since the start of lockdown on 23 March 2020 as they show how pedestrians are interpreting the 2m physical distancing rule.
Some of the data from these cameras was included in an excellent ROLSI blog post by Eric Laurier, Magnus Hamann and Liz Stokoe that I assisted on the rise of ‘social deviance’.
I thought others might find it useful to read how to quickly take video from a live camera – it’s a great way to get a quick and dirty bit of data to test a hunch or do a rough analysis.
There are thousands of live cameras streaming to YouTube, but it can be tricky to capture more than a few seconds via easier screenshot methods.
Note: before doing this for research purposes, check that it complies with relevant regional/institutional ethical guidelines.
Step 1: download and configure youtube-dl
Youtube-dl is a command line utility, which means you run it from the terminal window of your operating system of choice – it works great on any Unix, on Windows, or on Mac Os.
Don’t be intimidated if you’ve never used the command line before, you don’t need to do much other than copy and paste.
I couldn’t do the installation method, but there are many online:
Mac:
window:
I assume if you’re a Unix user you know how to do this.
Step 2: copy and paste the video ID from the stream
Each Youtube video has a video ID that you can copy from your browser’s address bar. This is what I used for the blog post mentioned above – what we dubbed the ‘kebab corpus’. Video ID circled in red:
Step 3: use youtube-dl to start collecting your video data
This part is a little tricky – as the software isn’t really used as intended or documented, so I made a short video walkthrough. Maybe there is a better way. If so, please let me know!
As I mentioned in that video – it’s probably best not to let youtube-dl run for too long on a stream as you’ll probably lose the video if something happens to interrupt the stream. I managed to catch up to half an hour at a time.
It’s possible to create scripts and automated actions for various operating systems to do this all for you on a schedule – but if you need an extensive video archive, it’s best to contact the stream owner to see if they can send it to you. their high quality youtube archive.
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