Posted: . At: 3:44 PM. This was 1 year ago. Post ID: 17516
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The best way to download a video from a news site. Download blob videos.

It is possible to download a blob video from a news website such as news.com.au. Open the news story and open the Firefox dev tools with the F12 key. Then navigate to the Network tab. Click the Media option and then start the video playing. Then the media elements will appear. The content.m3u file was what I was after, this was used with yt-dlp to download the sound and video and merge this into a playable mp4 file.

The Firefox dev tools open. Viewing the Network tab.

Just right-click on the content.m3u8 file and copy the URL to then paste this in the terminal to download the video with yt-dlp.

Copy the URL of the playlist file to begin phase 1.

Then it is easy to download a news.com.au video to make a nice webm or for archiving purposes.

┌──(john㉿DESKTOP-PF01IEE)-[/mnt/c/Users/Intel i5/Videos]
└─$ yt-dlp https://ssaimanifest.prod.boltdns.net/ap-southeast-2/playback/once/v1/hls/v4/clear/5348771529001/2cb8109a-39f2-4e4f-a4ce-ec3941116954/42528834-ee07-4a69-b829-5b3b5b897d44/8980a931-8cd0-48aa-9e69-dd6394311453/content.m3u8?bc_token=NjNkMjBiNTJfMjY4ZjE2NmZmOWRkMjgzNzNiOTdmM2JiZjllM2RkNWMzZmQ0YzEzYzgzZDM1YjdlYjJhOTgwYWFmNDU3MjA4OQ%3D%3D&rule=discos-enabled
[1] 181
 
┌──(john㉿DESKTOP-PF01IEE)-[/mnt/c/Users/Intel i5/Videos]
└─$ [generic] content: Downloading webpage
[generic] content: Downloading m3u8 information
[info] content: Downloading 1 format(s): 2312+audio-0-en__Main_
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 7
[download] Destination: content [content].f2312.mp4
[download] 100% of 15.26MiB in 00:04
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 7
[download] Destination: content [content].faudio-0-en__Main_.mp4
[download] 100% of 1.24MiB in 00:01
[Merger] Merging formats into "content [content].mp4"
Deleting original file content [content].f2312.mp4 (pass -k to keep)
Deleting original file content [content].faudio-0-en__Main_.mp4 (pass -k to keep)

This is a neat trick, but this worked on the news.com.au website and should work on others. As long as there is a master playlist file that manages the playback of the video on the website, this should work just fine.

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