Getting started
To do this properly, you need to understand how those websites work.
For the shake of simplicity fellow “pirates”, they utilize m3u wiki link
m3u899% of the time.
You will also need yt-dlp install it if you don’t have already
Example on utilizing this knowledge
- Go to your favorite streaming site
- Simple press
F12 - Go to
Network - Select
XHR(XMLHttpRequest) - Filter URLs for
m3u8- If you find more than one, just test them out, you will soon find the trick on your own :)
- Copy the URL
- Open a terminal and type
yt-dlp <your-copied-link>
Do it Ethically
Some may call us pirates, which I find really cool
But the true evil Pirates/criminals are the ones that keep the power to themselves and don’t share it with others
Information is the only true power, and it should be free(free as in free speech) for all.
Share your own tips & tricks in the comments if you want!
I have VideoDownloadHelper addon for Firefox, and most of the time it works. There are some exceptions of course, where it cannot download the video. But I love finding out new ways to do it, in case the old ways fail one day. Good post, man!
Thanks!
It’s a must have add on, but it’s still just an add on, we should know the basics of what’s happening behind the scenes to sail the 7 seas.
The reason I posted that is to inspire some of you in creating fancy scripts that can easily do more than downloading just one video.
VideoDownloadHelper is really cool. I use it in chrome to download music and vids. Every 500th download it congratulates you and asks for a donation or some positive review.
Last time I tried downloading a yt video with it and it didn’t work. Been using yt-dlp now and it’s magic.
This doesn’t have to do with the topic at hand, but it’s just so cool being able to directly reference sites and ways to download on Lemmy, rather than dancing around the topic on Reddit.
This is what Reddit was like in the golden era, ~2010-2014ish
It changed after they banned r/megalinks. I remember the day. The piracy sub purged content around that time. Then 2-3 years later the sports streaming subs went down.
Until copyright owners start banging on providers of those who host these instances sadly. Give it a few years and we will be back there
It’s a lot harder for copyright holders to intimidate the fediverse. First of all, there isn’t a single entity that can do the policing for them. Second, fediverse servers are across the whole world, in jurisdictions other than the US.
Yeah! If there’s too much attention from US companies the instances related to piracy can just move. I’m wondering what’s the law for US residents who host their website in another country, do they still have to respect US laws?
They can send DMCA strike to Contabo and then sue Zer0 directly.
That’s the beauty of the fediverse. The community can move to any lemmy server, especially one outside US jurisdiction.
I’m aware, but the current one is in Germany.
Yep, it’s bound to happen as the instances get larger. For example, it’s why I will mention there are actually awesome leaked playable builds of Gears of War 3 on PC which are super fun to play, but I won’t link directly to them.
My fellow crewmen, yt-dlp is great but you don’t need it if you have vlc installed on your pc, you could just open Convert / Save function (Ctrl + R for shortcut), click the “Network” tab", paste the hls (m3u8) or dash (mpd) link and save it as you normally would.
Alternatively,
ffmpeg -protocol_whitelist file,crypto,data,https,tls,tcp -stats -i <URL.m3u8> -codec copy <FILE.mp4>.Also, some m3u8’s are just files containing redirects to other m3u8’s in various resolutions. You might want to extract the one you need and download that.
You are the only
personlegend who, with this command, has allowed me to download a video from a shitty website that “breaks” the movies/series into small pieces. THANK YOUEDIT: Movie, not Film
A r/piracy post that is actually useful? A sign of the times
Adding to topic:
If you want an android specific tool. Use seal from fdroid
seal is so good. i use syncthing to sync my music library, seal downloads from my phone and yt-dlp from my pc. works perfectly ;)
Ha same here 🍻
There’s a few websites I’ve been to where this methodology doesn’t work, and it’s not because there’s no m3u file or whatever. Some sites will work fine but then the moment I open dev tools the site will freeze. I think the site knows when I open dev tools and makes itself essentially crash.
They mostly use inline JavaScript to determine if the dev tools are open. If open, then they put you in a loop that will only end of the tools are closed. Normally when this happens the debugger will “pause” at the line in question.
If you know how to use the “unlock origin” extension, you can then block the JavaScript inline function so it won’t run. Then the page will not stop when the dev tools are open.
You can Google how to block inline JavaScript with ublock origin.
I’m sure there’s some browser tweaks to get around this
Thank you for this. It works, but the download is super slow. I wonder what she’s this? I downloaded the same link on IDM and it was much faster.
Link?
Pretty sure any video on PrimeWire gives me this problem.
The ublcok solution above works fine, but you don’t have to use the dev tools while in the site. Just F12 before going to the site -> performance -> start recording -> close dev tools -> visit site and start watching the video -> close tab and back to dev tools -> capture recording
Xtreme Download Manager lets you do this with ease (and more) and can check for the latest yt-dlp version before downloading on its own.
MPC-HC lets you play and download YouTube videos using yt-dlp.
Is there something similar for android? Used to use amaze browser but don’t know there’s better options out there.
I think Seal might work for you.
VLC player iirc.
On Mozilla Firefox if a video is played in an iFrame - you can:
Right click -> This Frame -> View Frame Info -> Media tab.
There you can see all pics and videos loading in that iFrame
I thought yt-dlp autmatically parsed the page looking for m3u8 links.
It’s been a while since I needed it for anything other than Youtube though.
I’m pretty sure it does, as part of the generic extractor it falls back to for unsupported websites.
I’ve always just copy pasted the URL from the adress bar, much easier and worked every time so far.
Glad to see the call for ethical piracy in this thread. As pirates, we should be more understanding of the fact that information should be shared without any red tape so to speak.
Yeah I try to avoid pirating from independent creators if I think they actually deserve to be supported.
My fellow crewmen, yt-dlp is great but you don’t need it if you have vlc installed on your pc, you could just open Convert / Save function (Ctrl + R for shortcut), click the “Network” tab", paste the hls (m3u8) or dash (mpd) link and save it as you normally would.
JDownloader has handled just about everything I’ve thrown at it
There is also yt-dlg, one of the frontends for youtube-dl or yt-dlp.
Interesting! I do something similar except I just scour the media F12 tab until I find what I’m looking for
There fancier ways to do this, it’s just an intro. What exactly are you usually looking for?
F12 and searching that mass of incoherence for “maxdefault” (iirc) is how I grab YouTube thumbnails.
