[ARD:mediathek] Bypass age restrictions

[madduck]

• I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2016.11.04
• At least skimmed through README and most notably FAQ and BUGS sections
• Searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones

What is the purpose of your issue?

• Bug report (encountered problems with youtube-dl)
• Site support request (request for adding support for a new site)
• Feature request (request for a new functionality)
• Question
• Other

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Description of your issue, suggested solution and other information

The ARD:Mediathek has this funny "feature" whereby certain videos are not
available during (CET/CEST) daytime, using server-side time checks. They do
this do protect children (with arguable value), but they are also imposing
inconvenience upon everyone in other timezones.

The restriction can easily be circumvented, e.g. using this
site, and it'd be trivial to add this to
youtube-dl.

The following instructions have been worked out by Birk Blechschmidt, who
shared this info with me specifically for the purpose of this feature request:

1. Given a URL like
   http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Tatort/Echolot/Das-Erste/Video?bcastId=602916&documentId=38642286
   extract the documentID

2. Call
   http://mediathek.daserste.de/play/media/{$documentId}?devicetype=pc&features=flash
   with {$documentID} replaced by the extracted ID. This will yield
   a JSON structure.

3. From the contained _mediaArray array, extract the object that has
   _plugin == 1. There will be a sibling _mediaStreamArray array which
   lists all the available direct download/stream URLs (_stream) together
   with a _quality label (integer, the higher the better…)

You can inspect the JSON dump like this:

GET 'http://mediathek.daserste.de/play/media/38642286?devicetype=pc&features=flash' | python -m json.tool

It'd be great to have this

[madduck]

Wow, it's as simple as that… I tried the patch and it seems to work.