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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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
@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.
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.
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