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!

  • Soltros@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Captain_Wtv@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • dustojnikhummer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

      • ghariksforge@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • damipereira@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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?

      • ipkpjersi@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • roxy@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    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

  • Audalin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Casta@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      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

  • NOOBMASTER@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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!

    • equalszero@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      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.

    • deepfake@kbin.social
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      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.

  • Archy@lemmy.world
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    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

  • roxy@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    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.

    • adderaline@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      you can download it from all linux package managers i’ve tried. not sure if linux counts as malware or not.

    • ruffletuss@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      yt-dlp is legit. It’s a fork of the yt-dl project, adding in a few extra features. yt-dl itself is used in a number of open-source projects like NewPipe.

      yt-dlp is also an open-source project, with its source code available on GitHub for everyone to scrutinise. If it had malware bundled in it, it would have been easily identified by users.

      You can try a GUI for yt-dlp here. I only use the command-line version so I won’t be of much help with it, but lmk if you run into any trouble.

      You could alternatively use Jdownloader2. It’s an amazing all-in-one downloader. Just copy the link of the YouTube video, and it’ll automatically pick up the video you’d like to download. You can change the quality of the video to download and even download the subtitles, thumbnail and description too. For music, you can choose to only keep the audio track in the m4a, opus or ogg format. Here’s a video guide to get it installed and running.

    • samwise@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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

          • burtek@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            There is a website in my country hosting DRM-protected documentaries. So far I only was able to screenrip that from FF with disabled hardware acceleration using OBS, but that method sucks since I can’t really use PC at the time. I might give this one a try then…

        • roxy@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Long time root user here, I use a lot of extensions with it such as Xposed and Frida. Even though there are tools with which you can manipulate DRM, I have never heard of one that can completely remove them and successfully play a DRM-protected content. The closest one to what you mentioned used to be able to remove the DRM library from the system but couldn’t play anything on Netflix.

  • 5 Card Draw@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yeah I try to avoid pirating from independent creators if I think they actually deserve to be supported.

  • Difficult_Bit_1339@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • clb92@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’m pretty sure it does, as part of the generic extractor it falls back to for unsupported websites.

    • Azzu@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I’ve always just copy pasted the URL from the adress bar, much easier and worked every time so far.