Rick's b.log - entry 2025/12/28

Downloading video that's a TS (m3u8)

So what to do, in order to see how this story resolves itself?

Psychological torture is just how it goes when you're bad...
Screenshot from Netflix.

Well, there are three possibilities.

1. Watch it on the BBC's catchup service. Due to being outside of the UK, this option is not available to me.
2. Watch it on Netflix as it is a partnership with them. I just checked and it is there, but this might not be an option for you if you don't have Netflix.
3. Find it elsewhere.

The obvious choice for me, with HD and subtitles and all, is to just watch it on Netflix. But where's the fun in that? So let's work with option 3. And, since I'll want to watch it at a time when comms may not be available, like maybe when my car is being looked at tomorrow, I'll want to pull a copy.

Big disclaimer

Finding a source

Google makes this easy.

Getting a useful link

But it also means some more effort will be required in order to get a playable video from this. However there is a useful shortcut, and that shortcut is that the service will initially offer an m3u8 file that is a list of all of the pieces necessary to assemble the video. Your browser simply fetches each one in turn and plays each piece, usually seamlessly, so it appears to you as a complete video.

Assuming you're using Firefox (or a fork like Waterfox), press Ctrl-Shift-I.
(if you are using something like Chrome or Edge or Safari, give up now...)

The screen will split in two. Paste the URL up at the top and fetch it. A frankly ridiculous amount of stuff will scroll by in the lower half of the screen.

You may wish to look for a gear wheel icon in the playing video to check that you are at the best quality setting. Sometimes services will start with 360 or 480 when they have 480 or 720 (or better) available.

After a while, it'll calm down and you'll see it fetching a file with a .ts extension, a filename like "512887284_mp4_h264_aac_hq_1.ts", and some junk in between.

Press Space to stop the video from playing, and then slowly scroll up the list until you find a file with the extension .m3u8.

There you are, found you!

When you have found it, right click on it, go to Copy Value at the top of the menu that appears, and choose Copy URL from the submenu.

The copied URL was https://vod3.cf.dmcdn.net/sec2([blah blah blah])/video/482/788/512887284_mp4_h264_aac_hq_1.m3u8#cell=cf3 and if you were to try it a second time, you'll see that the blah-blah-blah is not the same, as it is a time and IP specific authorisation key.
Which means you must use the link immediately, you can't share or bookmark it.

Retrieving the video

rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ ffmpeg -i "the copied URL here" -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc output_filename.mp4

Let's break this down:

• -i specifies that the input reference follows.
• the copied URL is pasted in from what you copied above. DailyMotion URLs may have anchors (that is, a '#' and something following, you can see it says "#cell=cf3" above), you should remove these.
• -c copy means to just copy the data, don't try to reencode it.
• -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc is a special filter that tells ffmpeg to translate the version of the AAC audio with TS headers into a more normal AAC stream.
• output_filename.mp4 ought to be obvious.

So, the final command looks like:

rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ ffmpeg -i "https://vod3.cf.dmcdn.net/sec2(blah blah)/video/482/788/51288728
4_mp4_h264_aac_hq_1.m3u8" -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc WorstWitch_4-13.mp4

There will be a lot of gibberish scrolling up the screen as ffmpeg pulls all the bits of the video and pastes them together. On my machine it took about a minute, and ended with:

[out#0/mp4 @ 0x5e0da8b50f80] video:130551kB audio:26266kB subtitle:0kB other streams:
0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 1.230247%
size=  158746kB time=00:28:01.01 bitrate= 773.6kbits/s speed=50.2x    
rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ 

That was it, job done.
Now I can see how the story is resolved. ☺

Two-and-a-half big caveats

Secondly, there is the obvious matter of copyright. You did read the disclaimer above, right?

The final half caveat: some services festooned with undesirable amounts of advertising may have multiple m3u8 files. Look for one that has a name very similar to the .ts files.
Even then, some of the less pleasant sites may require you to run dozens of scripts from dozens of anonymous domains each bouncing back and forth (and opening tabs with rather dodgy things) until you are deemed worthy of accessing the video.
I would strongly advise simply closing the tab and looking elsewhere, as any site that needs more permissions than itself and a CDN (and maybe, at a push, a captcha to try to reduce bot scraping) should be treated with suspicion, and one that forces you to run unknown scripts from unknown places? Massive red flag - don't walk, run.
[although, I would be inclined to first add all of the crap that they want to NoScript's block list]

Electricity is coming down in price?

My consumption.

And this is the cost of electricity.

My cost.

As you can see, I used 1,730kWh in 2024 and 2,101kWh in 2025. That is an increase of 371kWh. The app, for some reason, is telling me that it's +629kWh increase between 1^st January and 23^rd November. Not sure why... But, whatever, it also says that there's an €86 increase in the same period despite both periods registering €621.

This is further broken down as follows. Here is 2024.

A breakdown of last year.

And here is 2025.

A breakdown of this year.

There will, obviously, be a little bit of disparity as the billing may or may not be missing a month. My last bill was the end of November, the next will be the end of January, so I'm not sure why the app is showing "as of Boxing Day" given that I don't have day-to-day tracking enabled.

But, whatever, that's a fair bit more electricity for the same price. Which I suppose is good and well because I'm burning through a few kilowatt hours right now given how cold it is at the moment. I am, however, making some use of the heat, other than heating me. The oven is helping make a nice lemon cake, between the layers of which shall be plentiful lemon curd. Then I can freeze the pieces so I have cake when cake is desired. Which is how it should be.

That being said, the EDF et Moi's estimation of consumption is ridiculously wrong. It reckons that I spend a good half of my money on bathing. Well, due to a mixture of abnormally low water pressure (I think I'm going to have to get a plumber to look at what's going on, but it's been low pressure and cloudy since those two back to back thunderstorm/floods and has never cleared itself up like it used to) and simply not justifying heating an entire 100 litre tank for a shower... I just boil water in a kettle to put into a bucket with cold water to give me 12 litres for a do-it-yourself shower using a measuring jug and the bucket of warm water. It takes about ten minutes to prepare, which is a far cry from 5-6 hours for the immersion heater.
Flipping through, a big chunk (€71) for lighting. Except that I don't like bright light. In my bedroom, the only light is usually a 12V table lamp with an LED 'projector bulb'. In the kitchen, as I write this, it's the Lidl strip light that I installed back in March. It is rated 6.8W but that'll be with both colours active. I only use the warm white, so maybe 3.4W?

This is really dumb, and wrong.

But the far bigger dose of nonsense is that - despite my profile mentioning it - there is absolutely no indication whatsoever of the real consumer of power, the one thing that made my bills double. No, not inflation, though that did too... it's my electric car. The car that draws a little over 2kW for around 2-4 hours every 2-3 days (depends on the weather and the distance travelled).
I can only think that this is an intentional choice, to try to make EVs seem "better" by blaming hot water for the lion's share of power consumption, when it's really the EV.

Actually, I have just looked. There is a payment history. So... in 2024 the six bills were for €88,62 (Jan), €95,81 (Mar), €86,69 (May), €93,98 (Jul), €106,56 (Sep), and €119,92 (Nov) - and spot when my car starts making itself noticed. I get €591,58 for that.

2025 has €135,68, €124,16, €109,33, €114,16, and €113,29 which is €596,62. Slightly more expensive, but not in any way that would represent the increased consumption (assuming that is correct - I'd be inclined to take it with a pinch of salt given the pricings don't match up to anything coherent).

Stranger Things

British-made cheddar. A nice lump of cheddar. Would you like to see a nice lump of cheddar? Of course you would like to see a nice lump of cheddar - who wouldn't want to see a nice lump of cheddar?

A nice lump of cheddar.

As for the series, I'm liking the pseudo-science explanation of what The Upside Down actually is. Though it seems odd that we're concentrating so much on one man/monster and his abducting children to borrow their innate powers. What happened to, for example, The Mind Flayer? Or that huge monster that trashed the shopping mall? Compared to what we've seen in the past, it seems to me that Vecna and his Demos is, well, disappointing. It's like defeating an entire Dalek army to find that The Final Boss is a morally vacant child that likes playing chess with the universe because there's nothing better to do.

It is also nice to see... what's his name, the bowl-cut kid that cries a lot, finally given something to do.

The final final part forever (until the lucrative call of spin-offs and prequels and sequels calls) will take place in just a few days. My god, it's been a decade coming.

As for my take on this - and entirely a theory...

If you have not caught up with Stranger Things, what follows will be spoilers. There is no further blog content beyond this, so you can stop reading here to avoid being spoiled.

Oh, the irony...
Screenshot from Netflix.

Still with me?

Okay, let's go!

We know that Will (?) has the ability to jack into the hive mind and control Vecna. At an important point, he does exactly this and is able to overcome and destroy Vecna, but for "reasons" something takes him out with it. First main character death.

We also know that the other special girl (I really ought to remember everybody's name, huh?) wants to end the entire story by ending both herself and Eleven. No more special blood, no more monsters. She is successful in ending herself (second main character death), but Hopper isn't going to allow her to take El down like that. So he does something dumb to save El (third main character death).

The bomb goes off, blows up the exotic matter, destroys the wormhole. The Upside Down ceases to exist, killing everybody present at the time (probably Linda Hamilton's character as well as that annoying bloke that does her bidding). It also, just because, wipes a good chunk of the real Hawkins off the map too - because all that power has to go somewhere. This may result in some more main character deaths. I'm just going to say Steve, Vickie, and Joyce are in the firing line here (for emotional impact).

As a side effect, it will turn out that El's special powers were because of the wormhole. Or something like that. So she will survive, but as a normal person now, but will spend the rest of her life on the run anyway.
The rest of the gang will be severely traumatised, and a huge chunk of Hawkins will simply be gone.

End of story. Not the happy ending we were looking for, because cosmic horror story happy endings mean "the big bad has gone" and not "we all survived".

Of course... it would be ridiculous to imagine that a teenage nerd figured out the essence of The Upside Down and what it really was from a notebook that described it all in enough detail that he couldn't not figure it out...and yet the army didn't know, didn't figure it out, didn't have any clue what was really going on. No, that's dumb. The army knows. And more than that, the army knows how to do it again.
The only thing they didn't expect was for a psychotic child to turn into a near-invincible demon able to rip through dimensions to abduct children to try to merge the two worlds to bring chaos to earth because, well, because he could. A child playing chess with the universe.

We'll see in a couple of days if I am in any way right, or comically off the mark. But I do predict some main character deaths because of the emotional impact. Well, it worked for Joss Whedon, didn't it? And, let's be honest, what you all remember from season four is Eddie absolutely shredding to lure the monsters, right? Most metal ever, right up until he dies...

Your comments:

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jgh, 29th December 2025, 06:25

This has been my problem with Star Trek: Strange New Things. I noticed the first two episodes in the TV schedules and they were good enough for me to decide to continue watching it. But it never appeared in the schedules again. I tried finding it online, but everywhere demands that I pay for some subscription to watch it.  But I've already paid a TV subscription! It's called the TV Licence.  Similar things happen repeatedly. Twenty years ago Duckman was on BBC 2, but they stopped at the end of Season 3 and never showed Season 4. So many times just as you're getting into something, it disappears.

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