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anarcho_pirate wrote

What do you suspect is the way they stream videos from the site? If I use youtube-dl myself I might have to wait ~10 minutes for a longer video to download before starting it (although to be fair I always use the highest quality available). Are they just on a fast connection and downloading lower quality videos on demand when someone visits the hooktube page for that video, and then streaming them from their site? Or is there some way I can use youtube-dl to stream from youtube while keeping the privacy benefits?

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leftous wrote (edited )

I believe what they are doing is using youtube-dl to convert the URL into its raw form (hosted on googlevideo). If you copy the link they are embedding on their site, you'll see that it's posted on googlevideo.com

So probably just the youtube-dl --get-url command

If you do that and copy the url into your browser, it's the same as using hooktube.

Edit: Just tested this and it works

youtube-dl [URL] -g -f 43

This produces the link that you can copy into your browser for direct streaming

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