Legal?

[niagara94]

Hi - I have a quick question.  How do I know which videos are legal to download and which aren't (I want to make sure to do things legally)?  Thanks.

[Wild Willy]

VDH does not download content that is DRM protected. So if VDH downloads it, you can
safely assume it's legal.

[Wild Willy]

Here's something rather odd that I just encountered. Medici.tv is always sending me
E-mails for things they're showing, that day, in the next week, things they're dredging
out of their archive they want to draw your attention to. It's a small price to pay for
signing up there as a member. Not a paying member, just a member. Not being a paying
member, I get plenty of E-mails from them begging me to pay, too. Anyway, it seems to be
a pretty innocuous site. Yes, it's behind password protection but in their case it's
hardly protection. If you love classical music, they can be a source of some pretty
tasty stuff . . . if you're willing to pay. And every couple of weeks or so, they put up
a free concert. Free for people like me who have non-paid IDs & passwords.

Anyway, I was scrounging around there & stumbled on a free opera:

https://www.medici.tv/en/operas/gilbert-amys-first-circle-scenes-sharashka-massy/

I've never heard of the opera or the composer but I figured it's an opera so what the
hey. The handful of free live shows I've seen on Medici.tv have downloaded just fine
with VDH. This opera is invisible to VDH. So I dropped back to Plan B: the manifest.
You can find details of what I'm talking about in here:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/BzPLK2YyL-s

Look for the reference to what to do when VDH has trouble downloading something. I used
the alternative technique you can read about by clicking the link over there.

I've attached the manifest I got for the opera. (The original was named m.m3u8 but I had
to change the file name to something with .txt because Google does not permit attached
files with the extension .m3u8.) Note the last line of the manifest. When I have
encountered things like this that mention AES & key files (note the very end of the URL
in that statement), the videos in question have been encrypted & ffmpeg wouldn't handle
them. Nevertheless, I'm adventurous so I grabbed the URL out of the 1920x1080 stream &
shoved it into ffmpeg. To my surprise, ffmpeg downloaded the stream without a hiccup.
Medici was giving me rather poor speed with this one, only in the 700,000-800,000 bytes
per second range for a while, and then getting slower. Other things I've gotten from
them have been faster. But this one was free so I have no right to complain. You can
see the results of my download in the attached image. It plays fine in VLC, video &
audio, although at the moment I have only sampled it; watching will come later. There
don't appear to be any captions. The player in the web page doesn't have a way of
turning captions on. No captions display in the player. I didn't see anything in the
Network Monitor that looked like captions. The downloaded file doesn't have any captions,
which is what you'd expect given the CLOSED-CAPTIONS=NONE parameters in the manifest. I
suppose since this is an opera in French for a French audience, they felt captions
weren't necessary. I don't know, even when I've attended performances of operas in
English, I've been happy they had surcaps above the stage because operatic singing in
English is as unintelligible to English speakers as it is to anybody whose first language
is something else. So I guess I'll just watch it & admire the acting & the singing but
not understand it. I've tried to find a libretto for this online but failed. I thought
I had found the subtitles for this but it turns out there was a non-opera movie made from
the same source & I had found the subtitles to the movie. I understood enough of the
first sung line that I knew I was not looking at subtitles that would match this opera.
Oh well. I'll have to make do the best I can. I'll listen on headphones & hope I can
pick up some of the words.

I'm a bit surprised by this case. You'll note that the URLs actually contain the string
"drm." Is this a DRM protected object? Maybe VDH thought so & that's why it offerred me
no variants at all for this video. But ffmpeg downloaded it so I'm just baffled. I
don't feel like I've hacked any security doing what I've done. I've had other cases in
which the VDH menu was empty & my attempts to use the manifest with ffmpeg also failed.
I've chocked those off to DRM protection & forgotten about them. But this one is
intriguing.