Plays.tv

Plays.tv was a platform for sharing video game recordings and screenshots. The website scheduled shut down on December 15, 2019. It actually shutdown on December 15, 2019 about 23:50 EST. About 112 TiB of content was saved; this is believed to be about 1/2 the videos, although not all resolutions. The 1085 TiB number mentioned elsewhere was for the entire S3 bucket, including all resolutions etc..
Note: some content that ArchiveTeam was unable to save may still exist...if other users saved or moved that content on their own. Some content may also have been moved to medal.tv using this importer that was posted in a reply to the Plays.tv Twitter account: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/medal-importer/cffgodhgpfohjfpedcjbfnphlhjegljm
== URLs ==
* Video watch page: https://plays.tv/video/$VIDEO_WEB_ID
* Thumbnail: https://d[01]playscdntv-a.akamaihd.net/media/$VIDEO_BUCKET_ID/transcoded/$RESOLUTION.jpg
* Video: https://d[01]playscdntv-a.akamaihd.net/media/$VIDEO_BUCKET_ID/transcoded/$RESOLUTION.mp4
Video IDs on the watch page URLs are [0-9a-f]{18}. In the bucket, two video ID schemes are in use: older uploads use a YouTube-like ID of [0-9a-zA-Z_-]{11}, newer ones are [0-9a-f]{8}[0-9a-z]{10}[0-9a-f]{6}. For the latter, the web page ID of a video starts with the same eight characters as the bucket ID, but the rest differs.
Known values for $RESOLUTION include: 144, 360, 480, 720, and 1080, with some resources only supporting lower resolutions.
The site uses two Akamai CDN domains, d0playscdntv-a.akamaihd.net and d1playscdntv-a.akamaihd.net, and both are proxies to the raptr-replay S3 bucket. That bucket contains about 422 million objects totalling 1085 TiB based on a scan from 2019-11-22 to 25.
== Internal API ==
* User feed: https://plays.tv/playsapi/feedsys/v1/userfeed/$USERNAME_OR_USERID/uploaded?limit=[10]&filter=[video|image] (parameters are optional, limit defaults to 10 (the desktop app sets it to 24 and the iOS mobile app sets it to 10), filter defaults to a blank string (none)) This endpoint contains metadata (including a download URL) for each video. Also has /playsapi/feedsys/v1/userfeed/USERNAME_OR_USERID/published?limit=12, /playsapi/feedsys/v1/userfeed/USERNAME_OR_USERID/uploaded?limit=12&displayType=unlisted (requires authentication for data), /playsapi/feedsys/v1/userfeed/USERNAME_OR_USERID/featured?limit=12, /playsapi/feedsys/v1/userfeed/USERNAME_OR_USERID/counts, /playsapi/feedsys/v1/userfeed/USERNAME_OR_USERID/published?limit=12&lastId=XXXXXXXX0000000000 (video ID).
* User profile: https://plays.tv/ws/orbital/profile/$USERID?_orbitalapp=1 (the orbitalapp parameter doesn't seem to do anything). Requires the user id, and won't return anything for usernames. It also lists 12 of the user's videos (with urls to video thumbnails but not the video files themselves), and the usernames, profile images, and ids of followers, following, and friend suggestions.
* The user id can be obtained by searching for "target_user_id" in the source code of their user page: https://plays.tv/u/$USERNAME
* Video: https://plays.tv/playsapi/feedsys/v1/media/$VIDEO_WEB_ID. Also has /react, /unreact, /track, /repost, /unrepost, /unlist, /publish, /comments?page=[0]&limit=[99].
* User: https://plays.tv/playsapi/usersys/v1/user/$USERNAME_OR_USERID Returns username, user id, profile picture.
* Comment: https://plays.tv/ws/comment/create. Also /delete.
* User timeline: https://plays.tv/playsapi/feedsys/v1/userfeed/$USERNAME_OR_USERID/timeline?limit=[12?]&filter=[(none)|friends] Requires authentication.
* Notifications: https://plays.tv/ws/orbital/notifications/get Requires authentication.
* Something related to streaming (maybe creating a stream?): http://stream.playsapi.tv/v1/stream?userId=$USERID&appVersion=3.0.0&augerVersion=$AUGERVERSION
== Recover videos ==
Automatic
* Open https://recoverplays.tv and enter your username.
* The website will show you if your videos were saved by Wayback Machine. Click Fetch to fetch all archived videos.
* Wait for all your videos to automatically be fetched by RecoverPlays.
Manually
* Open your user profile page in the Wayback Machine. For example: https://web.archive.org/web/20191210043532/https://plays.tv/u/g0dspirit. This will take you to your archived profile page.
* On your profile page, find the video you want to recover. Click on the video's title or thumbnail to open the video's archived page. Copy the URL of this page.
* Paste the copied URL into your browser's address bar. Remove all the parameters from the URL, including everything after the video title. Your URL should now look like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20191210043532/https://plays.tv/video/5d4b309b459e4014aa/samwell-sick-1vs5-clutch-esportal-clutch-5vs1-insaneplay-clipoftheweek.
* Enter the modified URL into your browser's address bar and press Enter. This will open the archived video page.
* On the video player, look for the resolution selector, which is located to the right of the playback time. Select the desired resolution, such as 720p.
* Click the play button on the video player to start playback. The video should, if archived, start playing at the selected resolution.
== References ==