While trying to find a torrent for a show, I became curious about how others are creating the torrents I know and love. Is ripping a video from a streaming service relatively easy? Are there tools y’all would recommend?
yt-dlp does a great job at ripping on majority of websites. If yt-dlp can’t rip something then likely there is service-specific tool to do that i.e tidal-dl for Tidal (hi-fi music service). There’s also a hardware method that involves cheap chineese hdmi splitters (it needs to be a cheap one, b/c they lack support for DRM) and hdmi capture card. Sometimes it’s DVD or blu-ray ripping.
there is service-specific tool to do that i.e tidal-dl for Tidal (hi-fi music service)
Do you know of any others?
Sadly, no. You can open https://github.com and look for name of service you’re intrested in.
From what I recall, this sort of stuff is usually kept as a closely guarded secret by those who do it. Perhaps someone else more knowledgeable about the practice could give some more insight.
Interesting, I wonder why that is. I guess to stay one step ahead of the corporations trying to prevent them from succeeding? I can’t imagine it’s to prevent others from following suit. Feels like that would be a weird motivation for people saving and disseminating content.
Usually the methods are not shared because streaming services would go out of their way to break them. Just like Youtube breaks yt-dlp every now and then. But Youtube is too big to implement any serious protection, so, downloaders usually win. I heard Crunchyroll is ripped via their mobile app, albeit modified. But specifics are better left in the dark.
You would have to crack DRM if you want to rip from streaming services. See Widevine.
There are multiple classes of security L3, L2 etc and correspondingly harder to bypass.
Fee people know how to bypass it. I guess you can research more about how it works and try to find if you can bypass it.
If anyone is seriously interested, I would suggest using a cracked Version of Streamfab: https://cdm-project.com/Download-Tools/StreamFab
If anyone needs more Infos or want to try other ways, you can check out this: https://cdm-project.com/explore/repos
I haven’t actually tried myself; but I’ve read many DRMs can be defeated by simply running the service in a VM, then screen recording the VM from the host.
Try to directly screen capture Netflix for example, and the webpage will appear as a solid black box in the recording; but not if the capture is done from outside the VM.
