Use download helper when needed (though it seems to be working on fewer and fewer sites). I was half joking in my previous reply, I never use the HLS streaming option - it has always seemed janky when I get a video that way.
If I encounter a streaming site which doesn’t offer a means of download, I do it manually. It’s pretty easy with Firefox. Just reload the page after opening the developer console (F12), start the movie, then skip to the end. Go to the network tab, and look for the fetches of type “mp2t”. Copy the URL of the last one (from the end of the clip) to get the template, which will vary only by a part number. It will look something like this:
That “187” value is what will vary. That’s the 187th part of the video. The next part is to create a batch file that calls wget 187 times with that url, changed from “seg-1” to “seg-187”, with output names from “clip001.mp2t” to “clip187.mp2t”. Run the batch file to fetch all parts of the video, then run the command “copy /b clip*.mp2t clipall.mp2t”, which concatenates all the parts into a single file (/b means binary mode, to avoid corruption from converted line end characters). The final step is to move the data into an mp4 container, which you can do using ffmpeg:
That’s not re-encoding anything, just copying the already-compressed video and audio data to a new file in the mp4 format.
Naturally, I script the creation of the batch file to download the parts. It is still possible to create it manually with judicious use of copy/paste without too much tedium, if basic scripting isn’t in your repertoire.
The various “download helper” programs are the way one is supposed to do this automatically, but in my experience, they all do a pretty poor job of it a lot of the time.
My manual method takes a minute to do, but it always works. The only real manual part for me is jumping to the end of the video and copying the URL, which I paste into a script that generates the batch file. I also don’t have to let some random third party know what I’m interested in downloading.
That’s pretty interesting and very smart method @Thanny - It does sound quite complex for the regular user, but Im wondering if thats something ES community may be able to use as their go to, for the reasons you mention above, and may help with script matching video consistency once and for all possibly if we all were able to stick to one method.
Are there really no downsides? Highest resolution original source downloads are possible?
You get exactly the video that plays in the browser. If you want the highest res available, you have to make sure you select that resolution in the player before seeking to the end to get the last segment number.
Providing Thanny’s process in an automated way is exactly the point of the various browser plugins. The problem is that webpages regularly change their format, and so getting something that works for all sites is a never-ending task.
I use ant video downloader for Firefox, it downloads HLS streams in segments and joins them together, xhamster uses HLS. You have the option also of choosing which format in most cases i.e. 720i 1080 etc