nachrichten

Quickly get the URL of the latest ZDF heute or Tagesschau (German news) video.

Why?

I'm watching German news almost daily, and having to visit zdf.de or tagesschau.de, finding the right video, clicking it, being redirected to another page every single time is annoying - especially as the front page quite often shows yesterday's video...

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

This usually takes more than two minutes, as I'll have to wait for the browser loading bunch of JavaScript and thumbnails and then still need to find the right entry on the page. This script? Less than a second.

Installation

Python >= 3.8 is required.

• Clone the repository
• Install dependencies: pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• Place nachrichten.py in ~/.local/bin or similar, if you want

Usage

There's no configuration at all, the script will always attempt to grab the latest video of the current day in highest quality.

The video URL will be printed to standard output if found, an error message with exit code 1 otherwise.

For Tagesschau:

$ python3 nachrichten.py tagesschau
https://download.media.tagesschau.de/video/2020/1119/TV-20201119-2021-2200.webxl.h264.mp4

For ZDF heute:

$ python3 nachrichten.py heute
https://downloadzdf-a.akamaihd.net/mp4/zdf/20/11/201119_sendung_h19/3/201119_sendung_h19_3328k_p15v15.mp4

This means you can directly open the video in VLC for example:

vlc $(python3 nachrichten.py tagesschau)

Aliases

I'm lazy, so I have two aliases for watching the German news.

tagesschau='vlc $(python3 /path/to/nachrichten.py tagesschau)'
heute='vlc $(python3 /path/to/nachrichten.py heute)'

Redirect server

server.py is a simple Flask web app that will 302-redirect /tagesschau and /heute to the current videos - useful for when you need a permanent URL (ht @codingcatgirl).