An explanation on how to download videos from the website 'twitcasting.tv' using FFmpeg
In the past, it was possible to download videos from Twitcasting by replacing parts of a link (http://dl01.twitcasting.tv/(id)/download/(number)?dl=1) with the corresponding video's channel and it's numerical ID. Unfortunately, it has been patched and removed.
Fortunately, there is another method that still works, and (most likely) will never be patched.
Edit (19/04/2021): As of recently, twitcasting has ramped up their countermeasures against downloading videos, but as of now all you need to do is add a couple headers into the request.
A computer, and a web browser.
This tutorial assumes you are using Windows (7/8/10) and Google Chrome, however, any modern OS and browser should work.
When you watch a VOD from Twitcasting, it first has to find it's corresponding .m3u8 file, which contains a link to all the fragments of the video. The first step to downloading a video is to find the link to this file.
Note: Due to recent updates, at least play the video for a few seconds and allow it to buffer before grabbing the links. You don't have to play or buffer the whole video, but make sure to do at least the first few seconds. This prevents twitcasting from killing the link before you are able to download the video. Also, while I don't think it’s quite necessary, perhaps keep the browser tab open in the background while you are downloading the video.
If you know how to use your respective browser's developer console, you can find the video element on the page and copy down the links from the element's data-movie-playlist section. Since Twitcasting splits up streams longer than 1 hour into multiple parts, you may find multiple links, so you should copy them all down, the order in which they appear in the data-movie-playlist is the same as the split videos. The links are enclosed within a large portion of JSON data.
If you are not familiar with the above, then you can also do a simpler method. Open up your browser's developer console (F12 on Chrome, search up it's equivalent on your browser), and paste the following JavaScript code. It should return all the .m3u8 links you need.
let a=[];for(let _ of JSON.parse(document.querySelector("video")["dataset"]["moviePlaylist"])[2])a.push(_.source?.url);console.log(a.join("\n"))Since it's dangerous to paste in code which you do not understand, I'll try to explain how this works.
let a=[]; // This initializes an empty list for use in the next line
/* This line finds the element of the webpage that contains the list of links, and adds all of them to the list created above */
for (let _ of JSON.parse(document.querySelector("video")["dataset"]["moviePlaylist"])[2])
a.push(_.source?.url);
console.log(a.join("\n")) // This line prints out the contents of the list created in the first line, separated by a new line.Because of twitcasting's new security measures, you'll also have to find your particular browser's (same one you used to get the links) User-Agent. This is usually pretty easy, and if you just type into google "What's my user agent", you'll get a box with a long string that looks something like this: 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.72 Safari/537.36'. This value changes with browser updates, and it has to be the same browser as the one you used to get the links or else this won't work. Just copy it down and move on to the next step.
Once you have the .m3u8 links and your User-Agent, you can now move on to downloading the actual videos. For this, you will need a program called FFmpeg, which you can download here. Window's users specifically can download from here (direct link). Either way, this should give you a zip archive, which you should extract to somewhere accessible, preferably your desktop or downloads folder.
Then, open up your command prompt (or terminal in the case of MacOS/Linux users), and cd into your extracted folder. You can open a command prompt (cmd.exe) on windows by either searching 'cmd.exe' on your windows search bar or pressing Windows Key + R and typing cmd.exe. To CD into the folder, please find the location where you extracted your FFmpeg archive. For example, if you extracted it into your desktop, you should type the command cd C:\Users\(YourUsername)\Desktop\(FFmpegFolder)\bin. Please replace (YourUsername) with your windows username and (FFmpegFolder) with the name of your FFmpeg folder, which by default will look something like ffmpeg-YYYYMMDD-XXXXXXX-win64-static.
Once you have done that, you may proceed to download the videos. Assuming you have correctly cd-ed into the right folder, you can paste in this command.
ffmpeg.exe -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls,crypto -user_agent "{User_Agent}" -headers "Origin: https://twitcasting.tv" -i {link} -c copy {name}.mkvYou'll need to replace the {User_Agent} with the one you found in step 2 (make sure to enclose it with double quotes "link this"). You need to replace {link} with one of the .m3u8 links you grabbed back in step 1, and you need to replace {name} with the name of the file you want it to be saved as. It will be saved to the bin subfolder of your FFmpeg folder. Don't use the same name for two different downloads or you could accidentally delete one of your previous downloads.
Importantly, note that the file extension of the saved file is .mkv. You cannot change this to .mp4 as the download will not work properly, but you may convert it to mp4 after it has finished downloading (See bottom for FFmpeg command to convert .mkv to .mp4)
Once you have completed all of this, your download should start. It will display quite a lot of text, but this is normal. If the text is either yellow or red, however, this means that a problem has occurred. The only exception is at the start you may get a yellow warning that says "No trailing CRLF found in HTTP header. Adding it.", this is expected and you can ignore it. Otherwise, the best course of action is usually to cancel the download (either close the command prompt or press CTRL + C) and restart it by retyping/pasting the command. While it is downloading, do not turn your computer off, and try not to do anything else while it is still running. Down the bottom of the command prompt, there should be a speed value, which looks like 1.234x. This means that for every second, FFmpeg is downloading 1.234 seconds of the video, and using some basic maths this will allow you to figure out how long the download will take. Please note that if your internet is not that strong it may take more than an hour for each hour-long part.
Please open an issue on this GitHub repo, since it's probably the best way of getting in contact with me.
Run the following command, replacing the words within the braces (braces = {}). Do not keep the braces.
ffmpeg -i {input}.mkv -codec copy {output}.mp4
Credit to kassarin
A batch file has been made to provide a streamlined download experience, please have FFMPEG installed and make sure ffmpeg.exe is in your PATH or else place the script in the same folder as the executable. Only tested on Windows 10.
MD5: 8bc94a9c9d8017a958abbf21b75b5b0e