this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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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

  • m3u8 99% 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!

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is what Reddit was like in the golden era, ~2010-2014ish

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

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.

tab

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You are the only ~~person~~ legend who, with this command, has allowed me to download a video from a shitty website that "breaks" the movies/series into small pieces. THANK YOU

EDIT: Movie, not Film

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Adding to topic:

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 ;)

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm sure there's some browser tweaks to get around this

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is there something similar for android? Used to use amaze browser but don't know there's better options out there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think Seal might work for you.

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[–] PCChipsM922U 13 points 1 year ago

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

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

[–] Difficult_Bit_1339 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

JDownloader has handled just about everything I've thrown at it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

There fancier ways to do this, it's just an intro. What exactly are you usually looking for?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there anything for Linux?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

https://cdm-project.com/

They have a lot of good tools and guides for getting setup to pull drm encrypted streams. You’ll need access to an android device that has root to be able to pull drm keys from. It took me a bit to figure out how to get it setup. They had to remove the all in one setup page so the software is outdated but I followed this (https://web.archive.org/web/20230315101847/https://cdm-project.com/cdm-tools/how-to) and just searched for the latest versions of the software they reference and got it working to download off disney+ and wowpresentsplus

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Information is Ammunition

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

But for blob:urls you need an extension.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

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