NCAA Tournament (March Madness Live)

[hj83]

I am trying to download NCAA Tournament games from https://www.ncaa.com/march-madness-live

A few years ago, I was able to do this, but it seems the format might have changed and I can't do it now. Does anyone know how it might be done? I have tried Tubedigger, livestreamer, youtube-dl, but those don't work.

[sysanin]

youtube-dl



Tubedigger

[hj83]

Thanks, sysanin! Great examples!

I continued trying to figure this out after I posted, and I finally did figure it out using another method just before you posted.

I might as well post my method along with what exactly I did to get it working for people who are new to this.

First, you need to detect the m3u8 playlist. I do this with The Stream Detector by rawrower (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hls-stream-detector/) using Firefox. When you start to play a game, the links pop up and you can copy them and use them in a stream capture program. I used streamlink (https://streamlink.github.io/). Here is an example command to capture a game (It won't work now because you have to capture them live.):

streamlink "https://marchmadness.cdn.turner.com/227/auburnvsnew-mexico-st/de/master.m3u8?hdnts=exp=1553191762~acl=/227/auburnvsnew-mexico-st/*!/227-b/auburnvsnew-mexico-st/*~id=40fcb8fe7ad02d96f2927a7d955aaada~hmac=e61e5bf 821f771c93fa7bdc549db39157f0dfcc9c203946a2deaac406 59dd845" best -o "C:\game.ts"

This captures this game to the file "game.ts".

If you use youtube-dl, you give the same link to it. Both programs seem to work equally well. As far as I can tell, Tubedigger will only let you capture prerecorded steams, not live streams, so you can download the highlight videos of games, but not the games themselves in progress. I could only get Tubedigger to capture small pieces of the games that were in progress. I don't think Tubedigger has a way of linking the fragments together.

If you are trying to figure out how to get this to work, you can try to capture streams on ncaa.com even before the NCAA Tournament starts again. They have other live events going. Today there are NCAA Division II tournament games being played. That's what I did when I was testing out sysanin's methods a couple days ago.