Game videos for research purposes

[skywalker7861]

Hello
I am new to the forum. I am in grad school and looking for game videos to do some analysis. The goal is to track players, ball and trying to see if we can estimate positions of players etc. I was wondering if forum members can point to some place where we can access video files for such academc research purposes. Thanks, Venkat

[A Gravity Well]

Having problems remembering where this was posted, but you don't need video: player tracking from SportVU on NBA.com possession chalkboards can be parsed into X,Y something like 20 times a second

[skywalker7861]

thanks. i have heard about Sport Vu. I need the raw video files to train our computer vision models.

[A Gravity Well]

thanks. i have heard about Sport Vu. I need the raw video files to train our computer vision models.

How good of quality do you need? nba.com/stats regular season box scores have videos of every event, (probably) encompassing a continuous 48 minutes in overlapping segments.

Beyond that... ballstreams?

[dale]

Someone else might be able to fill in the gaps but here are the basics

Let's say you're looking at this game:
http://stats.nba.com/game/#!/0021400816/playbyplay/

The play-by-play data is available at:
http://stats.nba.com/stats/playbyplayv2 ... artRange=0

The SportVU data for event 1 is available at:
http://stats.nba.com/stats/locations_ge ... 0021400816

videoevents for event 1 is available at (I haven't figured out how to use this yet):
http://stats.nba.com/stats/videoevents? ... e=&mtitle=

Individual plays (ex: Frag256) can be downloaded in f4f format using the url below. You'll need to handle permissions to download it.
http://nbalp-vh.akamaihd.net/z/nba/big/ ... g1-Frag256

[skywalker7861]

hi..thank you for the links The last one seems to be blocked though. Is there anyway we can get access to that video link?

[dale]

To download the video from the last link you can follow these steps
1. Open Inspect Element in your browser and load the play-by-play video you want to download (ex: http://on.nba.com/1NDwus0).
2. Open the Network tab in Inspect Element and find the play-by-play videos. Their type is video/f4f and their url should start with http://nbalp-vh.akamaihd.net.
3. Find the request url, user-agent, and cookie. You can change the fragment number to download different clips.
4. Download the video using curl.

Code: Select all

$ curl -v "REQUEST URL" -H "User-Agent: YOUR USER-AGENT" -H "Cookie: YOUR COOKIE" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch" -H "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8" -o output_file.f4f

Here's the output when I run the command.

Code: Select all

$ curl -v "http://nbalp-vh.akamaihd.net/z/nba/big/leaguepass/2015/02/21/0021400816_home_,high,.mp4.csmil/0_c078a35f75c35505_Seg1-Frag258?pvtoken=exp%3D9999999999%7Eacl%3D%252f%252a%7Edata%3DZXhwPTE0NDYyMzE1NTN+YWNsPSUyZip+ZGF0YT1wdmMsc35obWFjPTU1YzA1ZTYwZjAzOGM3MGYyYWU5MDhjOWNkMWMxMmRjMDBiZGY4ZGNlODYzODYzNmUyOWUwZGU0MWU3NmYwOTQ%3D%21DARVtDnCIZT+INvlDHG/74Y1jIyPaCv3JyVvJ/fZLvE%3D%7Ehmac%3D447C1D8A6A2E7741F417DCADDFE32ED0084E550E801EC11EC36423F61560F368&als=5.05,30,NaN,0,2685,15627,33.41,0,0,282,f,0.94,19,f,s,SWJQCKKNXHCZ,3.4.1,282&hdcore=3.4.1&plugin=aasp-3.4.1.1.1" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch" -H "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8" -H "Cookie: MY COOKIE" -H "User-Agent: MY USER-AGENT" -o output_file.f4f
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0*   Trying 184.86.240.226...
* Connected to nbalp-vh.akamaihd.net (127.0.0.1) port 80 (#0)
> GET /z/nba/big/leaguepass/2015/02/21/0021400816_home_,high,.mp4.csmil/0_c078a35f75c35505_Seg1-Frag258?pvtoken=exp%3D9999999999%7Eacl%3D%252f%252a%7Edata%3DZXhwPTE0NDYyMzE1NTN+YWNsPSUyZip+ZGF0YT1wdmMsc35obWFjPTU1YzA1ZTYwZjAzOGM3MGYyYWU5MDhjOWNkMWMxMmRjMDBiZGY4ZGNlODYzODYzNmUyOWUwZGU0MWU3NmYwOTQ%3D%21DARVtDnCIZT+INvlDHG/74Y1jIyPaCv3JyVvJ/fZLvE%3D%7Ehmac%3D447C1D8A6A2E7741F417DCADDFE32ED0084E550E801EC11EC36423F61560F368&als=5.05,30,NaN,0,2685,15627,33.41,0,0,282,f,0.94,19,f,s,SWJQCKKNXHCZ,3.4.1,282&hdcore=3.4.1&plugin=aasp-3.4.1.1.1 HTTP/1.1
> Host: nbalp-vh.akamaihd.net
> Accept: */*
> Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
> Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
> Cookie: MY COOKIE
> User-Agent: MY USER-AGENT
> 
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:07 --:--:--     0< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: AkamaiGHost
< Mime-Version: 1.0
< Content-Type: video/f4f
< Content-Length: 1820774
< Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2015 04:12:02 GMT
< Connection: keep-alive
< Set-Cookie: MY COOKIE
< 
{ [4568 bytes data]
100 1778k  100 1778k    0     0   127k      0  0:00:13  0:00:13 --:--:--  366k
* Connection #0 to host nbalp-vh.akamaihd.net left intact