1080p support for Hotstar

[johnsmathew]

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Hotstar shows upto 720p videos on their website and youtube-dl supports all of them. However, modifying the m3u8 file url gives 1080p videos. Does adding support to download a higher quality video than the ones provided in the original website violates any of the terms of youtube-dl?

[yan12125]

modifying the m3u8 file url gives 1080p videos

Please give an example video and how to do such a modification

[johnsmathew]

Modifying the format_url as follows after getting it from format_data['src']

format_url = re.sub(r'(_STAR.mp4)', r'3000,4500,\1', format_url)

youtube-dl then lists 1080p with the available video formats.

Sample hotstar link : http://www.hotstar.com/movies/singham/1000065774

[yan12125]

Interesting. How did you find this hack?

[johnsmathew]

Today I had to download few videos from hotstar and found this in a forum. This has been around for over an year. But everyone suggested manually modifying the link and using ffmpeg to capture the stream. I tried modifying youtube-dl and it worked. So I thought I would share it here.

[yan12125]

It's OK to add dirty heuristics, just need to check URLs with _is_valid_url

[johnsmathew]

Please see this PR #12098