How to Get the MPD URL

[Sitz]

Hello all,

I am trying to write a Python programme that will automatically determine the MPD URL. Can someone please indicate how to get this information from the Developer Tools for the Bitmovin demo? I can see the actual MPD URL in the tools window but I can't find the request that provides the URL in the first place. Thanks!

[Gromyko]

Right click on the mpd in dev tools. Now copy as cURL cmd or cURL bash

curl 'https://cdn.bitmovin.com/content/assets/art-of-motion_drm/mpds/11331.mpd' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9' \
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
  -H 'origin: https://bitmovin.com' \
  -H 'pragma: no-cache' \
  -H 'priority: u=1, i' \
  -H 'referer: https://bitmovin.com/' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="130", "Google Chrome";v="130", "Not?A_Brand";v="99"' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Windows"' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-site' \
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.111 Safari/537.36'

Convert this to python and use in your script


use https://curlconverter.com/

import requests

headers = {
    'accept': '*/*',
    'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9',
    'cache-control': 'no-cache',
    'origin': 'https://bitmovin.com',
    'pragma': 'no-cache',
    'priority': 'u=1, i',
    'referer': 'https://bitmovin.com/',
    'sec-ch-ua': '"Chromium";v="130", "Google Chrome";v="130", "Not?A_Brand";v="99"',
    'sec-ch-ua-mobile': '?0',
    'sec-ch-ua-platform': '"Windows"',
    'sec-fetch-dest': 'empty',
    'sec-fetch-mode': 'cors',
    'sec-fetch-site': 'same-site',
    'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.111 Safari/537.36',
}

response = requests.get('https://cdn.bitmovin.com/content/assets/art-of-motion_drm/mpds/11331.mpd', headers=headers)

[2nHxWW6GkN1l916N3ayz8HQoi]

Can someone please indicate how to get this information from the Developer Tools for the Bitmovin demo?

What's the video URL specifically? There are multiple bitmovin demo pages that each use dash mpd.

[Sitz]

Right click on the mpd in dev tools. Now copy as cURL cmd or cURL bash

curl 'https://cdn.bitmovin.com/content/assets/art-of-motion_drm/mpds/11331.mpd' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9' \
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
  -H 'origin: https://bitmovin.com' \
  -H 'pragma: no-cache' \
  -H 'priority: u=1, i' \
  -H 'referer: https://bitmovin.com/' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="130", "Google Chrome";v="130", "Not?A_Brand";v="99"' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Windows"' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-site' \
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.111 Safari/537.36'

Convert this to python and use in your script


use https://curlconverter.com/

import requests

headers = {
    'accept': '*/*',
    'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9',
    'cache-control': 'no-cache',
    'origin': 'https://bitmovin.com',
    'pragma': 'no-cache',
    'priority': 'u=1, i',
    'referer': 'https://bitmovin.com/',
    'sec-ch-ua': '"Chromium";v="130", "Google Chrome";v="130", "Not?A_Brand";v="99"',
    'sec-ch-ua-mobile': '?0',
    'sec-ch-ua-platform': '"Windows"',
    'sec-fetch-dest': 'empty',
    'sec-fetch-mode': 'cors',
    'sec-fetch-site': 'same-site',
    'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.111 Safari/537.36',
}

response = requests.get('https://cdn.bitmovin.com/content/assets/art-of-motion_drm/mpds/11331.mpd', headers=headers)

Thanks for the information. But if I didn't inspect the Developer Tools, how would I know that 11331.mpd is the correct MPD? Which browser request informs the browser that 11331.mpd is to be used in the first place?

What's the video URL specifically? There are multiple bitmovin demo pages that each use dash mpd.

I'm using this one:

https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm

[Obo]

You'd have you emulate a full blown browser include javascript engine to find out. There is probably no generell solution for this task (except probaly you are coding a browser plugin).

All download tools I'm aware of work differently (i.e. not acting like a browser): the developer analyzes beforehand what urls the browser requests and picks the specifically important requests for his code. Usually only a fraction of the requests a browser makes is necessary to find the mpd url.

Take a look at how widefrog/Devine/yt-dlp/freevine/Kodi (python tools) work, and compare with how Widevine-Guesser/WidevineProxy2 (browser plugins) work on the other side.

[2nHxWW6GkN1l916N3ayz8HQoi]

I'm using this one:

https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm

Like @obo said, there aint a general solution. If, for some reason, you want a specific solution for this website, here's a trivial script

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

SOURCE_URL = "https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm"


def get_mpd(source_url):
    response = requests.get(source_url).text
    response = BeautifulSoup(response, 'html.parser')
    response = response.find_all('span', class_=lambda x: x and 'hljs-string' in x)
    manifest = None

    for span in response:
        try:
            manifest = span.getText().strip()
            manifest = manifest.replace("'", "")
            manifest = manifest.replace('"', "")
            assert ".mpd" in manifest
        except:
            manifest = None
            continue
        if manifest is not None:
            break

    print(manifest)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    get_mpd(SOURCE_URL)

Output:

https://cdn.bitmovin.com/content/assets/art-of-motion_drm/mpds/11331.mpd

[Sitz]

You'd have you emulate a full blown browser include javascript engine to find out. There is probably no generell solution for this task (except probaly you are coding a browser plugin).

All download tools I'm aware of work differently (i.e. not acting like a browser): the developer analyzes beforehand what urls the browser requests and picks the specifically important requests for his code. Usually only a fraction of the requests a browser makes is necessary to find the mpd url.

Take a look at how widefrog/Devine/yt-dlp/freevine/Kodi (python tools) work, and compare with how Widevine-Guesser/WidevineProxy2 (browser plugins) work on the other side.

Thanks for the insight, much appreciated.

[Devshree]

How to get mpd link without watching being video?

Could someone explain?

[2nHxWW6GkN1l916N3ayz8HQoi]

You get mpd link without interacting with the page, by writing a script