A stream to the see

Some TV channels (okay, most of them) offer some kind of possibility to stream their content online. Usually, those streams have to be viewed in a browser, and they are interrupted by a nifty amount of current ads. Let's look at a more convenient way to stream publically available content.

When opening such a site, let's for the sake of argument use the site of German TV channel Pro7 and, after logging in (it's free to create an account), let's pick a show and open an episode.

When opening the site, usually the stream starts after showing some (okay, a lot of) ads. While waiting, we open the developer tools of our browser (F12 in Chrome) and switch to the network tab. Now we refresh the page and filter the loaded resources for the string "m3u". From the results showing, we right-click the first playlist and choose "Copy link address".

Now, we fire up VLC media player and chose "Media" > "Open network stream..." (Ctrl+N). In the dialogue, we paste the URL we just copied, et voilà - we see the stream in our favourite media player. Oh, and a nice side effect - no ads ;)

If you want to, you can write the stream to a file, just choose "Convert" instead of "Play" when opening the network stream. I would recommend to not convert the streams and just write the contents to an appropriate container (eg. mp4 or mkv).

Additional side note: the stream URL might be dynamic and change over time. In my experience, it does not effect the playback, but when pausing or stopping and restarting it might cause issues.