NHL.DL

A script for downloading and re-assembling NHL.tv video streams. Won't help you watch NHL streams live.

NOTE: THIS SCRIPT REQUIRES AN NHL.TV ACCOUNT, OR AT THE VERY LEAST ACCESS TO THE KEYFILES USED TO DECRYPT STREAMS THAT YOU CAN ONLY GET IF YOU HAVE AN ACCOUNT.

Message to NHL.tv

Hi, my name's Casey and I'm a hockey fan who lives in Australia. With the recent change in your stream delivery infrastructure, it's made it basically impossible for me to watch games. I use a Linux home theatre PC, and the flash player doesn't work on it. Also, despite the fact that I have a reasonably ok internet connection (for Australia, anyway) the medium quality stream still lags horribly. I'm not sure what changed here, because it worked fine on GCL. I tend to watch the Habs SportsNet streams - do you put them in Canadian CDNs or something? The US streams seem less laggy, but maybe it's a coincidence. Anyway this script is utterly useless for watching live games, and really only interesting for expats with an NHL.tv account but bad internet, who want to have the game waiting for them when they wake up... or get home from work.

Usage:

$ ./nhldl.sh <master_m3u8_url> <quality>

Example:

$ ./nhldl.sh "http://hlslive-l3c.med2.med.nhl.com/ls04/nhl/2016/02/10/NHL_GAME_VIDEO_TBLMTL_M2_HOME_20160210/master_wired_web.m3u8" 2500

Requirements:

• An NHL.tv account, or access to the keyfiles on NHL servers.
• Mac or Linux. Sorry Windows users! You could maybe run it through Cygwin?
• The url for the master m3u8 stream file you want to download.
• A copy of ffmpeg, or avconv? I can't keep up with that project.

How do I find the m3u8 file?

Open the developer tools / inspector in your browser, and watch an nhl.tv stream. On the network tab, enter 'm3u8' into the filter. Click on the file called something like master_wired_web.m3u8 for the URL.

How do I download the keyfiles?

Each stream has a number of keyfiles that are used to decrypt its segments. NHL.tv has (wisely) decided to put these files on a secure server that requires authentication. You can either download them manually using your browser (the script will tell you their URLs and where to put them), or you can export your cookies from your browser to a file called cookies.txt in the same directory as this script, and they'll be fetched automatically.

If someone wants to figure out how the bloody hell nhl.tv's auth works, we could scrape the login process and add user/pass to the script arguments. Submit a PR! :D