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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a few websites I've been to where this methodology doesn't work, and it's not because there's no m3u file or whatever. Some sites will work fine but then the moment I open dev tools the site will freeze. I think the site knows when I open dev tools and makes itself essentially crash.
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.
This has been my method for browsing on desktop. It has come in really helpful for when I had lectures to get through, but the default play speeds were too low, so I'd download it and then get through it faster at like over 2x speed.
I'd also like to give a shout out to the 1DM app on Android. 1DM+ version without ads was worth the money to me, and has been really reliable too.
Thank you for this awesome information! I agree with the statement about sharing the power and that information should be free (as in speech) for all. Let's make internet a better place!
@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.