Greasy Fork

This is pretty cool, but it doesn't work for hianime at the moment. At least not for me. It gives a bunch of "couldn't decrypt .." messages. A pop up box does appear and you can extract/download m3u8 files, but those are not the actual video files

I would try to help, but I haven't been able to get around hianime kicking me out of the admin panel. It's so annoying.

ughh... HiAnime is broken yet again huh....
I'll get to fixing it soon...

btw, u can get around most devtools blocks (like that getting kicked out) using these two-
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/anti-anti-debug/mnmnmcmdkigakhlfkcdimghndnmomfeo
- https://greatest.deepsurf.us/en/scripts/440060-anti-anti-debugger
(yea, for hianime we need BOTH)

Fixed~!!

Nice, that was quick. Thanks for those anti-debug extensions/script. I once spent like 2 hours trying to get around that and I still feel mad about it

Actually, I just checked and it doesn't work. A bunch of "failed to extract Nonce" errors show up, and a partial list of m3u8 files is produced. No download links

A bunch of "failed to extract Nonce" errors show up, and a partial list of m3u8 files is produced. No download links

hmm... i tried just now and it still works fine for me...
So, is there any pattern to when u start getting the nonce errors?
Can u also share the link on which anime ur trying this

I once spent like 2 hours trying to get around that and I still feel mad about it

I used to think getting past these sites was impossible at one point, but theres a much simpler sure-fire trick... u can override the content of the .js file which contains the anti debugging code (u need to find it with trial and error) and then just comment out those lines. This is the proper way.

Turns out it was an issue with MegaCloud rate-limiting us to 10 reqs every 1 minute.
Its fixed now. Give it a try~!!
I couldnt figure out any workarounds, so for now the script respects that ratelimit, which means the extraction is a LOT slower now...
Extracting 24 eps can take upto 4 mins.

Ah cool. I also just figured out I can use python/ffmpeg to download the files with the m3u8 links. Extraction speed doesn't really matter, so that's not a big deal

Am I maybe not understanding what you actually mean by 'download link'? Because it's still not working, if I assume I'm supposed to be able to download a video file. I mean, I can stream the video via the m3u8 or download that stream via something intermediary, but I can't actually download a video file. Trying to save the video from the stream link is about as slow as watching it directly, so that doesn't seem like it has any benefit

I'm not getting any error messages this time. But at this point I think I'm probably just not interpreting "download link" correctly.

I get ur confusion... This script aims to extract the streaming links from episode pages. Its focus is not for downloading episodes, but specifically just getting the streaming links... Now that has multiple uses, one of which being able to batch download episodes (yea, that's a byproduct and not the target feature)
Being able to extract streaming links' primary usage is when u wanna play that anime on your preferred media player (like mpv) and thats what i personally use this script for. (I have an entire folder with 100s of exported links)

For actual download links, the website must support .mp4 format streaming links. Now that's actually rare as most use .m3u8 and so far the only sites that support mp4 links are otaku-streamers, Animeheaven, Aninow & Animegg.
I have plans on integrating a built-in downloader directly within the script, but thats not gonna happen anytime soon (it's pretty hard)

Getting to the issue abt speed... well accessing directly via link should give you the maximum speed the server allows, so im not sure what u mean by it being as slow as streaming... Try using a different downloader.
Even with just ffmpeg I was able to download a link extracted from hianime in abt 5 mins. (my network isnt too good atm, so it could possibly be faster)

Yeah I got confused initially. So even though I did get the error messages I mentioned, I don't think the script was ever failing to produce m3u8 links. It seems like the links from Hianime are heavily throttled though, and the subtitle files are not 'embedded' in them, I don't think. I ended up using "the stream detector" extension in combination with the anit-debug extension you mentioned in order to find the vtt links.

All I'm really looking for is some place to download anime that doesn't have hardcoded subs. There's a really great download tool on github for animepahe (KevCui/animepahe-dl), but that website only has hardcoded subs unfortunately. That downloader also supports multiple connections, which circumvents throttling, I think. I basically have it running in google colab and have it dump everything to google drive

Though maybe I could use your script as the basis to make something similar for m3u8 links in general. I'll have to wrangle some llm chatbots to make that happen

With ffmpeg the speed was around 1.2x what regular playback speed would be. At least, that's how ffmpeg measures the download speed. I also tried yt-dlp because that one supports resuming interrupted downloads, but it sucks at measuring speed. It was excruciatingly slow, in any case. But it still means I can just leave it running in the background and get the files eventually. The problem then is having to fetch the vtt files one by one afterwards which is a pain.

I'm in rural SEA so my internet is also terrible, but it's still at least a few mb per second, while the ffmpeg download was something around 50kb :(

ahh i forgot abt the subtitle files!!
I've been focusing only the mpv support lately that i neglected the extraction UI... The subs are being extracted, but u need to click the export button, and then the subtitle vtts will be included for each ep...

I'll work on bringing the subs to the UI sometime soon.. I feel I might need to rewrite the entire UI since i've added a lot of features since settling on the current UI and its time to expand it, but that would be pretty time consuming...
For now I'll quickly expose the subs in the UI in my free time.

Personally for downloading, I already have a python script written here- https://github.com/jeryjs/Userscripts/raw/refs/heads/main/AniLINK/AniLINK_Downloader/get-m3u.py
It doesnt have subtitles support yet, but I'll add it pretty soon some time today.

I was getting atleast 5x speed with ffmpeg, so it must be your network that has the issue... try extracting links from animekai or animepahe and see if the speed's the same there too.
btw, not sure if u know the conventions for network speed, but typically speed test sites show ur speed in Mbps while downloaders like ffmpeg show it in MBps. u can look up whats the difference between the two with some llm as i think u might be confusing the results of a speed test with ur actual download speed.

Subtitle support added to the interface!!
I've also updated the python script to support packing the subtitles directly into the output mkv.