nfhs-scraper

Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for what you choose to do with this script and guide. I do not endorse avoiding paywalls or any illegal activity relating to this matter, I am simply providing a Python script to those who are interested.

NFHS Network is "the leader in streaming Live and On Demand high school sports."

In short, you need to pay $10 a month for a subscription to watch these games. As an athlete, I didn't want to spend $10 a month to watch my own games, with ads in it, so I made this.

Usage

Download the provided main.py Python file, so you can run it yourself. Remember, whatever you do is your choice and your responsibility.

Navigate to https://www.nfhsnetwork.com/, and find your school and sport, and select the game video you'd like to download.

In the last portion of the url, you will find the game ID.

e.g. https://www.nfhsnetwork.com/events/cool-high-school-cool-town/gam4576a0f402 -> game ID is gam4576a0f402

In the main.py file, do 2 things:

• Change the game_id variable to your game ID.
• Change the scrub_count variable to however much of the game you'd like to download. The game footage sometimes goes until 1-2 hours after the game ends, so you can usually omit this by lowering the count.
  • Scrubs are 10 seconds long each, you figure out how many of them you want to get your desired video length.

Run the Python file, and let the magic of computers do it's thing. It can take a while, but the video will be saved to output.mp4 in the same directory as the project, by default.

How it works

With only a bit of reverse engineering, it isn't too hard to understand how NFHS streams video to the user, and why this script works.

NFHS requires a subscription to watch the videos, and with this subscription comes an API key used to fetch the stream. In this case, you need a valid API key to fetch the stream, which is a .m3u8 file that looks a little something like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGET-DURATION:10
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:0
#EXT-INF:10.000000,
gamed408a95df_000000.ts
#EXT-INF:10.000000,
gamed408a95df_000001.ts
#EXT-INF:10.000000,
gamed408a95df_000002.ts

...and so on

Here, we notice a few things.

• a) each media file is 10 seconds long, as specified by EXT-INF and EXT-X-TARGET-DURATION
• b) the media files are incremental, meaning we don't need the .m3u8 stream at all to construct one ourselves

In the network tab, while watching the game, I could see my browser making a request to these files, which are hosted at https://cfscrubbed.nfhsnetwork.com/. I tried downloading one of these files myself, and was able to do so successfully with no authentication needed. So, hypothetically, I could download every file and then patch them together into one big video.

Hence, nfhs-scraper. :)

Feel free to star this repo ⭐