We do not advocate piracy, full stop. However, there are legitimate use-cases for offline viewing of content from streaming services.
MagellanTV if you don't know is a non-fiction, documentary streaming service and an alternative competitor to CuriosityStream.
MagellanTV already offers offline viewing through their application (at least on Android) but this does not work properly 100% of the time. You can see from this screen shot (red markers) even when on a fast internet connection of over 100+ Mbps, offline download still failed inside the MagellanTV app. Not cool.
We recently traveled internationally with a total travel time of just over 17 hours (this included two continents and the Atlantic ocean). Realizing our downloads in-app would not work mid-air without internet connectivity would have been quite upsetting. We wanted our content on our device locally and that meant saving the videos directly.
It is possible to download and save the video content directly from the MagellanTV website (obviously you must be valid and good-standing, subscribed customer).
You can use youtube-dl or youtube-dl-gui but we used good'ol wget instead because its faster and less prone to failure. You can easily install it on any Linux-based OS; sudo apt install wget (Ubuntu and Debian).
Step-by-Step
1. Login into your MagellanTV account using your web browser.
2. Search for content.
3. Play video.
4. Open browser inspector > Network > look for any .ts or mp4.ts segmented video files. You may need to refresh or restart the video depending on your browser.
5. Copy the url.
6. Paste the url in a new browser tab but remove the -XXXXX-01.ts or .m3u8 file extension in favor of just the .mp4 filename that precedes it.
7. Visit the actual mp4 url; it'll play just the video itself.
8. Using wget enter the command below, changing the video filename to the hosted url and what you would like your desired filename (typically the title of the show).
wget -c VIDEO-FILE-URL.mp4 -O YOUR-FILENAME.mp4
Cloudflare 403
One caveat is that some videos from MagellanTV are hosted via Cloudflare while others are not. In our tests, it was only the Cloudflare hosts that will error out with a 403 denied status. Most of our videos used a host called https://videos-fms.jwpsrv.com which all downloaded without issue using wget (and youtube-dl-gui too). Some 4K and some newer videos seemed to be hosted at Cloudflare more often so those are likely off-table using this method.
Offline in Good Faith
MagellanTV offers you offline content in their native Android app for a total of 30 days. Once you have consumed your saved documentaries its only in good faith that you delete the saved content within the same time peroid, as directed by the streaming service. It goes without saying sharing any content is strictly forbidden.
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