[request] Download reddit video via yt-dlp

[MitPitt]

Reddit videos are served from v.redd.it, where video and audio are 2 separate streams. They did it on purpose to make videos api-unfriendly and force people to use the native website or app.

But yt-dlp can download such videos just fine. They can be cached in upvote-rss, and served as attachments in the generated RSS feed.

[CodaBool]

Wow that explains a lot! My videos are broken and I would love to see this feature.

I'd recommend using /r/oddlysatisfying as a good test bed. The vast majority are m3u8 videos

I think there was a discussion about this before but I can't find it. I think last time we discussed it could have been the RSS reader but MitPitt's explanation sounds more correct to me. I'm on Miniflux.

[johnwarne]

Interesting, all of the /r/oddlysatisfying videos are playing normally for me with sound in FreshRSS in my browser, and in my RSS reader Reeder on my Mac and iPhone. Wondering if it's a similar thing to what we discussed in the past with HLS videos, @CodaBool. What operating system/browser/app are you seeing broken videos on? And what do the videos look like? Is it video and no sound, or a broken looking player or something? When did the videos in your apps stop working as expected?

[CodaBool]

Note

I see the issue on Desktop. Mobile seems to be working for me.

NOT WORKING: desktop going to my local miniflux instance using Brave

Flatpak Brave = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/139.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
OS = Fedora 42 (Workstation Edition)

WORKING: mobile app, miniflutt

Dedicated RSS App = Miniflutt 1.16.0
OS = Android 16, Pixel 6

WORKING: mobile browser, brave

Browser App Brave = 1.81.136
OS = Android 16, Pixel 6

EDIT: checking some other browsers. These are all flatpak Linux:

Flatpak Edge: not working
Flatpak Firefox: not working. I did see an interesting error with Firefox: HTTP “Content-Type” of “application/vnd.apple.mpegurl” is not supported. Load of media resource

[CodaBool]

fed all the troubleshooting data I have into chatgpt and it suggested it's two issues. one with MIME and one with HLS support.

I tested with a Safari browser and it does play a reddit video without issue. (Going to my Miniflux/RSS reader website and attempting to read the exact same entry with a m3u8/HLS video)

Attempted again with brave on a Linux desktop and on Android. I can't get it to play HLS videos on any non- iOS/Mac platform now.

So, that suggests to me it does come down to HLS support.

[CodaBool]

Messed around with this last night. I actually got a hacky workaround for this.

I added a browser extension to run custom JS on page load. This allowed me to download hls.js from a CDN and in theory make a playable video element.

However, Miniflux adds a strict meta header which blocks the extra requests needed to whatever video hosting site reddit uses.

This isn't an issue on Mac/iOS since I guess those devices can natively play it (w/o whatever extra request I'm making?).

I did make a fork of Miniflux with that CSP header removed. Then ran my custom JS and the videos started playing.

I think given hls support is something that is either added by the website or the browser. I think I'll just see what I can do to get a pr going with Miniflux at some point (EDIT: tried a PR and maybe they misunderstood. They closed it since they thought HLS was something you can add in the customs JS section. Which is true but the CSP headers are the real issue with Miniflux. I still have my fork with those removed. I'd need to make a new PR. But I'll just use my fork for now).