Obtaining direct links to March Madness Streams

[uncomfortablyscruffy]

You can download K-S-V's Scripts here: https://github.com/K-S-V/Scripts

Here are the steps I took to get this working for me today:

1. Download KSV's scripts and the HDS Link Detector for Firefox.

2. Instead of downloading PHP, I downloaded "WampServer 3" which comes with Apache 2.4.17, MySQL 5.7.11, PHP 5.6.19, and PHP 7.0.4.

Installer looks like this:

wampserver3.0.4_x64_apache2.4.18_mysql5.7.11_php5.6.19-7.0.4.exe

3. Navigate to the PHP 7.0.4 install Folder, since it was not added to my PATH for some reason. Location on Windows 7:

C:\wamp64\bin\php\php7.0.0

4. Shift Click in this folder and select "Open Command Window Here" OR open a Command Prompt window and type "cd "c:\wamp64"

5. Open Firefox and Enable the HDS Link Detector add-on.

6. Navigate to the stream you wish to watch or download, in my case March Madness streams. Open said stream, and you should get a notification from the add-on that said a link was detected.

7. Right-click on the little notification box to copy the script prepared for you by the add-on.

8. Paste it into the Command Window that opened for you (I also had to specify quality with "--quality best" because I was getting a VERY bad quality stream on even on a good connection.

--quality   [param] selected quality level (low|medium|high) or exact bitrate

9. Find the FLV in the PHP folder, open it. I used VLC perfectly fine, but MPC-HC had a few issues after more than 10 minutes or so.

10. I failed to realize what exactly it was I was doing and closed the command prompt after opening the FLV. As you can imagine, don't do this. The script is constantly updating the FLV with stream data so closing it ends your stream. You can however close the browser/stream just fine, obviously.

I hope this covers everything. I broke it way down with each step no matter how simple and honestly I am sure you could do it much faster if you know what you're doing. Adding PHP to PATH would help speed up the process, as would specifying a name or location for the FLV.

In all it only takes me a few minutes to get streaming and it is great because I have a pristine copy of the game for later.

My code for the UNI-Texas game (worst possible feeling to end a game like that) was like this:

php AdobeHDS.php --manifest "http://mml2016-lh.akamaihd.net/z/mml_213@146021/manifest.f4m?hdcore=3.4.1.1" --delete --auth "pvtoken=exp%3D9999999999%7Eacl%3D%252f%252a%7Edata%3DZXhwPTE0NTg0Mzg4ODV+YWNsPSUyZip+ZGF0YT1wdmMsc35obWFjPWVkMGFhYmE5MGI5YTczNzUyYWRmODk5MWUwMWU5YWQyYTI4ZDNkZDkzZDA2Nzk4ZDg5NTE0Y2JlMzQyMDVjZjU%3D%21ORkU3tHHoXZPybfSV64ozAxgV3OquwEYZSMV6bovRhc%3D%7Ehmac%3D1EBBE498BF94DA722A04D1C88B9FB17A65A36244B5381C57AF1F68C72B5DDCBD&als=0,3,NaN,1,0,NaN,0,0,0,80,f,0,3768.41,t,s,BOGAZNIKICYY,3.4.1,80&hdcore=3.4.1&plugin=aasp-3.4.1.1.1" --useragent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0" --quality best

[shawn1122]

It depends on the device. I've tested this dump-to-file method on Mag254 set top box and it's able to play the an flv/mp4 over the network even if the host computer is writing to the file. The only downside is it adds an extra ~20 second delay to the video you're watching. The upside is you have a copy of the stream in case you wanted to check something out later.

The other option would be to try livestreamer with the hds:// plugin and see if you can get it to restream with the --player-http argument. Again, it depends on what other device you're using as this method may not work either. It will also introduce some delay though it won't be as bad as the dumping method.

[wer783]

This worked great last year. Now I get a message in Firefox that says HTML5 streaming is not supported and to use a different browser. Has anyone gotten it to work this year? I've tried awhile but haven't figured out any other way to do it.