grep -r "devtools" ~/writeups

~/writeups/finding-the-real-video-url.md
Terminal-style network capture showing an HLS manifest and a signed segment request, with a note that document.querySelector video src is often a dead-end blob URL

Finding the real video URL

Aug 6, 2026 · 8 min read

The <video> tag and page source rarely have the answer on modern, JS-rendered pages. A general, platform-agnostic approach to locating the actual media URL — network capture, embedded state JSON, and the two gotchas (blob: URLs, signed links) that break naive approaches.