Many—but not all—live-streamed programs are recorded. We understand it's not always possible to watch a program in real time, and as a courtesy to ticket buyers we are glad to make recordings available within 24 hours after the program has taken place. The recordings can be viewed for up to three days (72 hours) after they become available.
SmithSonian Associates has stated that they don't have sufficient storage space to make the recordings permanently available. If you can't watch the recording within the 3 days it will be available or want to have a permanent copy available for future reference, you can take the steps listed below to download an MP4 file of the recorded presentation.
If you click on the Watch button from your Encores page on the Smithsonian Associates website, you will be taken to a Zoom webpage. You can watch the video from that page, but if you right-click on the video, you will not see any option to save it. So you need to install a browser extension that will enable right-clicks to work on pages where they have been disabled.
Note: the instructions below are specifically for the Brave browser on a Microsoft Windows system, but the procedure for other browsers is likely to be similar.
I've found the Enable Right Click for Google Chrome™ extension developed by Tim Leland works well for downloading the videos — you can see other extensions he has created at his Extensions page. To install the extension in the Brave browser, you can go to the Enable Right Click for Google Chrome™ webpage in the Google chrome web store and then click on the Add to Brave button. You will then see a message informing you that "Brave does not review extensions for security and safety. Install this extension only if you trust the developer. It can: Read and change all your data on all websites". Click on the Add extension button.
Once the extension has been added to the browser, you should be able to right-click on the video on the Zoom page and select Save video as... to download a .mp4 file for the video (refresh the page if you don't see that option).
Unfortunately, you won't get the closed captioning (CC) information that is available during the live presentation and while watching the Zoom video, but you will then have the audio and video recorded during the live presentation — I like to have the closed captioning text, since I can search through it with a text editor to locate a point in the video where something was discussed. You can get the closed captioning Video Text Tracks (VTT) file, but that is not as easy. To get the .vtt file for the video in the Brave browser, start the video playing on the Zoom page, then right-click on the playing video and choose Inspect. You will see a pane appear to the right of the video window with Elements, Console, Sources, and Network at the top of the pane. Click on Network and then Fetch/XHR. While the video is playing with closed captioning turned on, you should see the closed captioning text appear on the video. I.e., make sure you haven't clicked on the CC button below the video on the line that shows how much time has elapsed in the playback of the video turning off the closed captioning feature. In the right pane, you should see columns with headings of Name, Status, Type, Initiator , etc. Under the Name column, while the closed captions are being displayed you should see a name that begins with "vtt". If you don't see it, click on the box to the left of "Disable cache" that appears between "Preserve log" and "No throttling" and below "Network" and then refresh the webpage. You should see something like "vtt?type=cc&fid=", which will yield the needed URL.
Right-click on that vtt entry in the column and choose Copy then Copy URL.
Paste that URL into a tab in the web browser. In Brave, that will result
in a Save As window appearing which will allow you to save the file
as type "VTT File" — the name will be something like
GMT20240307-231527_Recording.cc.vtt with the GMT being the
abbreviation for
Greenwich Mean Time, which is followed by the four-digit
year, the 2-digit month, and the two digit day, e.g., March 7, 2024 in this
case, which was the date the presentation was recorded.
As an alternative means of downloading the VTT file, once you have copied
the URL, if you are using a system running the Microsoft Windows operating
system, you can open a
PowerShell window and
use the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet. Type
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "copiedURL" -OutFile somename.vtt
pasting the URL you copied between the double quotes after
-Uri and with the name you wish to use for the downloaded
file added after -OutFile. If you wish to view the contents of
the file, which is just a text file, you can view it in the
Windows Notepad
editor as shown below. You will see lines with a time range followed by the
words spoken during the video during that time range.
PS C:\Users\Jim> Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/play/vtt?type=cc&fid=PPEowC3LvWC_9QzwSUMvy1l5Lj34MHPjmMjvWY6m7iTMfyswW21IqODA_HBEGTqNRZpiLNi4j2N9wU_w.EoqB72MpBnI47Vvw&action=play" -OutFile Leonardo.vtt PS C:\Users\Jim> dir *.vtt Directory: C:\Users\Jim Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a---- 3/8/2024 9:01 PM 78813 Leonardo.vtt PS C:\Users\Jim> notepad Leonardo.vtt PS C:\Users\Jim>
If you wish to view the closed captioning text while watching the downloaded video, you can do so on a Microsoft Windows system by right-clicking on the downloaded .mp4 file then selecting Open with and then choosing Media Player. At the bottom-right side of the Media Player window you will see a speaker icon. If you move the mouse pointer over that icon, you will see "Languages and subtitles (Ctrl+L)". If you click on it, you can select a subtitle/caption file by clicking on "Choose subtitle file" and then selecting the .vtt file you downloaded.
Then when the video plays, you will see the captioned text appear on it. Of course, the captions don't always exactly match what the speaker was saying.
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