Download all the Build Videos with RSS using Juice or PowerShell

Introduction

The conference sessions are starting to appear on the Channel 9 RSS feeds right now. If you are like me, then you probably want to download all of them and watch them later. Here is the method that I use to grab all the videos and thought that it would help others.

Note: You can use either Juice or PowerShell (which is located at the bottom of this post).

Let’s do this with Juice.

Navigate over to http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/ and select the option to Subscribe to this event:

I wanted all Build2011 sessions in WMV with High quality (surprising… isn’t it).

That gives me this URL: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/RSS/wmvhigh.

I can plus that into my browser and see the following:

But if you click on one of them, then it just takes you to the page:

I couldn't care less about this page as I only want the videos and I may not have an internet connection later on.

Let’s Solve This

Step 1- Download Juice and run the installer.

Step 2 – Once it is installed, then hit the Add Button.

Step 3 – Copy and Paste the URL of the feed you want to download.

Step 4 – That’s it. You are ready to start downloading. Please note that the files that have a 0.0 MB have not been added to the feed yet. Give it a day or so and it should appear.

If you really don’t want to install juice software, then you can use PowerShell.

Let’s Do This with PowerShell

The good news is that if you are using Windows 7 right now, then you already got PowerShell installed.

Go ahead and create a folder somewhere on your computer named: Build11. If you want to follow my example, then just put it on the root of C:.

Now open up your favorite text editor and copy/paste the following code:

cd "C:\build11" 
[Environment]::CurrentDirectory=(Get-Location -PSProvider FileSystem).ProviderPath 
$a = ([xml](new-object net.webclient).downloadstring
	("http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/RSS/wmvhigh")) 
$a.rss.channel.item | foreach{  
    $url = New-Object System.Uri($_.enclosure.url) 
    $file = $url.Segments[-1] 
    $file 
    if (!(test-path $file)) 
    { 
        (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile($url, $file) 
    } 
}

Note: The PowerShell script code is taken from a post by Scott Hanselman and variations of it exist all over the web.

Go ahead and save the file as downloadall.ps1.

You should have a folder named build11 and one file in it named downloadall.ps1.

The only thing you will need to do now is go to a command prompt and type “powershell”.

Navigate over to the directory you created earlier. I created one called build11.

Once you have navigated over to it, do a “dir” to see the contents. If you see your downloadall.ps1 script, then you are good to go.

Enter the command ./downloadall.ps1.

If you are having trouble actually running that command, then refer to this post.

Give it a few minutes (depending on your internet connection) and the files should start appearing in your build11 folder.

Conclusion

I hope this guide cleared up some of the confusion that people had with downloading all of the videos. If you would like to read more about Build from my perspective, then check out the links below:

• Bullet Points from Build–Day 1 and my thoughts
• From Soup to Nuts: Using VirtualBox with Windows 8 Developer Preview

Thanks for reading!