Like many I was disappointed and annoyed when I heard that Bluprint was closing. Even moreso, that it didn’t have an immediate plan to allow us to save our “own forever” classes. I have about 70-odd classes most sewing, a few knitting and a smattering of other classes.

What’s more frustrating is some are new to me and I haven’t even watched, and many I haven’t gone through as a systematic class yet. Though I do plan to (like making slopers with Susy Furrer).

Anyhow, I’ve seen discussions and had helpful messages about how to use extensions to download video files in Chrome. Unfortunately, I had zero success. This may be a skill or setting on my part, but I kept getting “No video file” as the error when following the suggestions. What’s more annoying is my Bluprint app used to allow me to download classes to watch when disconnected from data, and even that has given me errors recently.

So I was excited when there was an alternate software available to purchase. Sew Modern Bags posted a detailed step by step tutorial on how to use the software to save our classes.

It isn’t my intention to duplicate their detailed tutorial, but one thing I keep noticing is that Mac Users sometimes have different experiences. So, I wanted to document my experience using their awesome tutorial, as a Mac User.

Note: I chose to navigate to the site myself and to directly copy my bluprint URL, that felt safer than clicking links. I’ve provided them here but understand why you may not click!

Software

The software they recommend is Allavsoft, and they have a variety of licenses, and work for Macs or for Windows.

I followed the instructions for purchasing the software, and their site reports a 30 day moneyback guarantee, regardless of the reason, so I feel like the $22 purchase is a risk I can swallow.

I downloaded and installed the software, the steps matched the tutorial so that was easy.

Settings

Also were similar to the tutorial. The Preference window is up in the menubar Under Options and I set things up as instructed

The Main window looks like this:

UPDATE: See where it says automatically convert — I had that turned ON. Also, I did not have “Delete original file after conversion” selected and ended up with 2x video files for each class. I recommend selecting this box.

And then it gave me a box to load my email and password to the site, which I input. And just like was mentioned as a possibility, I got “Invalid Token” as the error.

So, the Tutorial recommended emailing Allavsoft so that’s what I did initially. Then I actually looked at the error window and it recommended submitting a support ticket, so I did that on their site here. They report a 1 business day turnaround time (support request sent Saturday June 6, 2020), so now I wait for their help. It did feel weird emailing them a password, so I set my Bluprint password as more generic. Since they are shutting down anyhow, I feel slightly less weird about that than sending my ‘real’ password to get input into the software.

According to the Sew Modern Bags Tutorial they fixed the glitch and classes could be downloaded, so I’m hopeful that this will be situated. So my download can start

I’ll update this post once I have more information…

UPDATE 1:

Well, they were attending to requests for Bluprint support, about 8 hours later I had an email reply. that was way ahead of the 1 business day they promised.

They’d updated the software, so I re-downloaded the software and it worked. My license key was already in my computer’s preferences, so I didn’t have to re-enter that.

I re-entered the Bluprint URL and it started working!

Troubleshooting

“Failed To Convert”

This morning I noticed a number of files are failing to convert.

I was suspicious it was a lack of space in my hard drive — there was no room for the temporary conversion files. So now I’m copying files to another hard drive with space so I can make more room.

Lesson Learned: 140GB isn’t enough room for my library. I recommend having an empty drive. I saw 5TB drives for ~$100 on Amazon.

I’ll update more as this progresses. It says it should take 13 days(!). Hopefully that’s an overestimate. Im transferring files off the hard drive so hopefully I’ll be able to resume converting files ASAP! Stay tuned…

Download time

Total time to download the 513 files was ~11hrs 08min, the app did crash once overnight, but the elapsed time picked right up in the same spot when I restarted the app. This also was slowed down while i moved files off the hard drive. The app wasn’t finished converting the files once the download was done. That continued on.

Time to Download & Convert

Once the files were downloaded each file went through a convert step I had set to automatically be done and that took until the next day. Total time from starting the download to finished was 1 day 6hrs and 15min.

I did not merge the classes into one long video as I often like to skip around and view each lesson separately.

File Organization

After downloading, all the files were in one long list, but each class has a number, so I manually sorted my videos into classes:

Tip: I didn’t click to automatically delete download originals and there was a text file another file as well as an MP4 in the “downloads” folder. I’d suggest turning on delete original downloads so you don’t end up with two MP4’s for each video.

I’ve deleted the originals manually and have tested randomly about 7 or 8 videos in classes and they all are playing just fine with my quicktime player. I haven’t double checked every video file yet, as I have 584 individual video files to check. I also haven’t yet confirmed all the individual episodes were downloaded, but I did check my favorite classes and those look complete.

Next Steps:

• Systematically Double check all the videos to make sure they work
• Review that my classes are complete
• Download any resources from bluprint that I want to save from the class “resources”

Wrap up:

It was a worthwhile project, and being on leave for my shoulder surgery I had time, It did take the better part of 4 days though several were just letting my computer download and process. I had 2 files that had errors, so the ~ 2 days of time (with lots of breaks) was worth finding them as I was able to re-download those 2 (~5min of time each). I suspect it was either when my software crashed or slowed down.

Now to backup my classes…