Downloading Brightcove Videos

Today I found a video series that I was datahoarding... I know...

Anyway, I found this old reddit post from 3 years ago on how to download from Brightcove. So I thought I would repost this here for posterity.

Here's the post below with some small revisions from 3 years ago by u/publiusvaleri_us

I had a short video that I wanted to try to download, but the brightcove style seems to be hard to parse. I was wondering if there's a way to find out the actual URL to do the download, and I started on a hunch.

Of course I visited the webpage with the video and let it play. In Firefox, I use Web Developer Tools, then I selected the Network tab. It listed a lot of the streams of the video (mp2t) that appeared to be a form of streaming. The secret is to look for a file type of "x-mpegurl" which is the key to feeding youtube-dl the correct video URL.

I found this step was made easier by uBlock Origin (I only had to look for the red blocked packets)

Here is my command: (You must use ffmpeg, because of the multiple streams)

youtube-dl --prefer-ffmpeg --ffmpeg-location ..\ffmpeg\bin --restrict-filenames [URL FROM Web Developer Tools->Network.]

The only problem I found out is that some of the x-mpegurl files produce an end result without sound. They were combined in ffmpeg as render-render.mp4. But I found another one that downloaded to a slightly larger file, and it was called "master-master.mp4" when it was done. That video has sound. So if you examine your URL possibilities, look for the word "master" somewhere in it.

...BLAH-BLAH/master.m3u8?fastly_token=BLAH,BLAH

Let me know if anyone has questions or needs a few pointers. I'm surprised I figured it out without a lot of problems. When youtube-dl gave me the error for the main URL, I figured one of you guys knew all about how to do this... turns out that I do.... shocked emoji.