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!

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.

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.

Adding to topic:

If you want an android specific tool. Use seal from fdroid

A r/piracy post that is actually useful? A sign of the times

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.

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.

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

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

Any website? Including all the streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, etc?

Interesting! I do something similar except I just scour the media F12 tab until I find what I'm looking for

Just install this download manager https://neatdownloadmanager.com/index.php/en/

Literarily catches any media even better than IDM and its free.

There is also yt-dlg, one of the frontends for youtube-dl or yt-dlp.

https://github.com/yt-dlg/yt-dlg

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.

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.

Information is Ammunition

Thanks! I will have to test it on some obscure local websites on which most of the downloaders not work.

This works 80% of the time, but I always have issues with jwplayer.

yeah yt-dlp is really good.

I wrote a terminal interface for personal use, so that it could read my list of links, extract the titles, and download the videos with proper filename that I want.

I also have a keyboardmaestro macro that automatically detects youtube links from my clipboard and inserts them into my download list. I've been using this approach for 2 - 3 years.

If I like a video, I'd actually go back to YouTube, give them an upvote and leave a comment.

But for blob:urls you need an extension.

Spotdl for downloading Spotify music. It's amazing also

Im going to assume this would also pull hard subs but has anyone tested it to know if it will also pull normal subs?

Been using j Downloader but It doesn't work with spankbang anymore will give it a try