Obtaining direct links to March Madness Streams

[uncomfortablyscruffy]

I am trying to watch the March Madness streams (from here) in a player like VLC or Kodi.

I have had success in the past obtaining links from websites like FoxSportsGo and YouTube streams by:

• Getting the .m3u8 from Chrome's network tab
• Livestreamer
• Sniffing Packets in Wireshark, Fiddler, or URLSnooper2

The March Madness streams are different though. I am still pretty new to the terminology so I am not sure if these are HLS or HDS (pretty sure they are not rtmp), but I know they do not provide an easy to read .m3u8 like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1024000,RESOLUTION=640x360,CODECS="avc1.66.30, mp4a.40.2"
http://linkgoeshere

When sniffing I get several .bootStrap files and a manifest file.

Dropbox Links to said files in case they are not attached right:

• Manifest.f4m
• .bootStrap

These are from a live stream that took place last night. I share them because when opened in a text editor they appear to have the information needed to obtain the .m3u8/direct streaming url, but I am not sure how to format it.

If anyone can show me a script that can parse these files and get the link, or show me how to manually do it I would be very appreciative. I have seen other instances on the forums where people have links and they want the direct .m3u8 but everyone has just given it to them instead of explaining how they did it. Thanks to those who took the time to read this!

[hoopjon]

Use K-S-V's AdobeHDS, and download the HDS Link Detector addon in Firefox. Once you downloaded it, click on the HDS Link Detector icon in Firefox, start loading the video. Then a script will pop up with the f4m link in it, which you can use with AdobeHDS. Once you run the script, you will se an flv file downloading, and you can play that live as the game goes on. At least it worked for me last year.

[uncomfortablyscruffy]

Thank you for the help! I will test this out and see if the method is still working.

[wer783]

Here is the link I get using HDS Link Detector using the method suggested by hoopjon for the current game that is going on (Michigan vs. Tulsa):

"php AdobeHDS.php --manifest "http://mml2016-lh.akamaihd.net/z/mml_103@372865/manifest.f4m?hdcore=3.4.1.1" --delete --auth "pvtoken=exp%3D9999999999%7Eacl%3D%252f%252a%7Edat a%3DZXhwPTE0NTgyNjU3NDZ+YWNsPSUyZip+ZGF0YT1wdmMsc3 5obWFjPTg3YTE1ZGFhNGI2OTA5OGMxYWRlNGViMWFmODhkZGY0 YmE2OTg1ZmYwOGEzYTY4MGI2MjM1MmFhYWE1Nzc3YmU%3D%21O RkU3tHHoXZPybfSV64ozAxgV3OquwEYZSMV6bovRhc%3D%7Ehm ac%3DBD8AA34152E95081E02FB47486A390C0377D879C0A2A8 BAB910FBEC7C9AB421A&als=0,3,NaN,1,0,NaN,0,0,0,84,f ,0,9420.4,t,s,IFMYFGGOEMOT,3.4.1,84&hdcore=3.4.1&p lugin=aasp-3.4.1.1.1" --useragent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0"


What do I do now? I tried to run this in php but I just get a bunch of text quickly scrolling through the command prompt window. No video file starts to download.

Has anyone gotten this to work? Could you give us the command line that you use at the php prompt that works?

[wer783]

uncomfortablyscruffy, I was posting at the same time as you.

Could you post the command line that you entered to get this to work? If I could just see the command line, I think I could get it to work. I must be doing something wrong.

Thank you.

[utuxia]

Where do I get this AdobeHDS.php script?

Is there any other way given the manifest file to figure out the url?

[uncomfortablyscruffy]

Originally Posted by hoopjon

Use K-S-V's AdobeHDS, and download the HDS Link Detector addon in Firefox. Once you downloaded it, click on the HDS Link Detector icon in Firefox, start loading the video. Then a script will pop up with the f4m link in it, which you can use with AdobeHDS. Once you run the script, you will se an flv file downloading, and you can play that live as the game goes on. At least it worked for me last year.

Okay so this method works perfectly fine for me, thank you. High quality stream playing directly from the FLV, but is it possible to watch this without having the script running on the device doing the watching? I would like to be able to watch it like this on other devices at the same time but I obviously can't do that if the host PC is constantly updating the FLV. Am I just out of luck? Thanks again.

[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.