HowTo: Download Video Content from ANY website

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!

25 comments

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.

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

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- 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.
  
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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.

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- Use firefox with arkenfox, then you wont have to enable DRM to stream videos
  
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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.

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- 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
  
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@The person who said one can use VLC to download m3u8 links, I tried this multiple times already, but sadly the resulting files were never complete. Either the video was cut off or the audio missing or the like. I used VLC on Windows.

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Spotdl for downloading Spotify music. It's amazing also

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

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Thanks for tutorial

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

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

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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.

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Is there any way to save this post for later?

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

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- 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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- @Astaroth, why do you use yt-dlp from aur if it is also in extra repository?
  
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- you can download it from all linux package managers i've tried. not sure if linux counts as malware or not.
  
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  Linux is definitely malware. I installed it and I haven't been able to use my computer since
  
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