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 just downloading one video.
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.
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.
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.
A r/piracy post that is actually useful? A sign of the times
