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!
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.
This is what Reddit was like in the golden era, ~2010-2014ish
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.
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.
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?
They can send DMCA strike to Contabo and then sue Zer0 directly.
That’s the beauty of the fediverse. The community can move to any lemmy server, especially one outside US jurisdiction.
I’m aware, but the current one is in Germany.
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.
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.
You are the only
personlegend who, with this command, has allowed me to download a video from a shitty website that “breaks” the movies/series into small pieces. THANK YOUEDIT: Movie, not Film
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.
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.
Last time I tried downloading a yt video with it and it didn’t work. Been using yt-dlp now and it’s magic.
A r/piracy post that is actually useful? A sign of the times
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.
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
Information is Ammunition
Adding to topic:
If you want an android specific tool. Use seal from fdroid
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 ;)
Been using j Downloader but It doesn’t work with spankbang anymore will give it a try
On that site you can just shift+right click and save the video. On Firefox anyway.
I heard you can just give yt-dlp the URL from your browser, no need for dev console lookups.
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.
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?
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.
Is there something similar for android? Used to use amaze browser but don’t know there’s better options out there.
I think Seal might work for you.
This works only for websites that don’t use DRM, such as Widevine. But there’re guides to decrypt the videos anyways. Tough luck with Widevine L1 tho.
Use firefox with arkenfox, then you wont have to enable DRM to stream videos
That’s not how it works. They can choose to fall back to unprotected videos, sure. But key players support DRM already, so why care about the rest? Netflix serves you 4K video only if your browser supports DRM. Heck, even YouTube requires DRM to watch movies.
