Downloading videos can be a pain, especially when the website you're using doesn’t want to make it easy. To prevent people from downloading their videos, some websites even use a

For some reason I got my back up about not being able to download a streaming video from a site.

I didn’t need the video, but this guide was useful for grabbing via VLC

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    This is sort of a confused article. blob: URLs (not blob in the url) are references to local data. They can’t really be downloaded (well if they are still live you probably can) and typically only contain a small slice of the video (timewise).

    What this is doing is finding the playlist file that describes this video and playing this (or using a player like VLC to stitch these chunks together).

    Then it has other instructions to use different tools for specific sites.

    So really the only reason blob: is relevant at all is because it is what you might see if you try the “simple” solution of right-click save. The actual article doesn’t deal with the blob: URL at all.

    So guess the more accurate title is “Are you trying to download a video but it has a blob: URL? There is a decent chance that this is using DASH or HLS under the hood. You can try to find the playlist like this: $find_m3u8 and then stitch that into a single video like $vlc”.