Playwright discovery against the live feed found every link, then the whole
chain was replayed in plain urllib with no browser at all:
SSESS cookie -> GET /oauth/browser-token -> JWT (90 min)
JWT + x-api-key -> GET /v1/entry/{id} -> hdnts master URL (~25s)
master -> hdntl token (24h) -> ffmpeg
Both auth hops live off the Akamai CDN, so plain Python reaches them; ffmpeg
handles the CDN, which is the only host Python gets 403s from. Nothing needs
a fingerprint forged and Camoufox is now a fallback rather than the plan.
Two assumptions this disproved:
- The play click is not part of auth. Manifests arrive before any click, so
a headless run needs no interaction to mint a token.
- The 90 minute JWT does not constrain a 2 hour recording. It is spent before
ffmpeg starts; the 24h hdntl token carries the match.
discover.py drives the page with Playwright and identifies the mint and token
endpoints by what they RETURN rather than by guessing endpoint names, so it
survives the endpoints being renamed. It rides existing Firefox cookies and
needs no password. Verified working with --headless.
Sniffer v0.5 adds muted autoplay: the browser only has to trigger the manifest
fetch, ffmpeg records real audio separately, and muted autoplay is permitted
where audible is not. It stands down once playback starts, because the control
is a toggle and clicking twice would pause the recording.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Kyt7QHQvLJtQRuiY4wAqKB
Mikkeli Matlock