How do I use curl impersonate with mpv?

[mikeyaworski]

Some sites put Cloudflare in front of their HLS segments, so I need to use some impersonation to circumvent the TLS fingerprinting that Cloudflare does.

My yt-dlp environment uses curl_cffi to do just that, and it's no issue if I use yt-dlp.

When I use mpv, I get 403 errors from ffmpeg. If I look at the logs, it's something like:

$ mpv --ytdl-raw-options=impersonate=chrome <some_url>

...
[   1.579][v][ytdl_hook] youtube-dl succeeded!
[   1.579][d][ytdl_hook] ytdl parsing took 1.459 seconds
...
[   1.579][d][ytdl_hook] script running time: 1.459 seconds
[   1.580][v][edl] Opening edl://!new_stream;!no_clip;!no_chapters;%116%https://<whatever>.m3u8;!global_tags,uploader=%8%<whatever>,ytdl_description=%0%,date=%8%20251004
[   1.580][d][edl] resize stream to 131072 bytes, drop 0 bytes
[   1.580][d][edl] Stream opened successfully.
[   1.580][v][demux] Trying demuxers for level=request.
[   1.580][d][demux] Trying demuxer: edl (force-level: request)
[   1.580][v][demux] Detected file format: Edit decision list
[   1.580][v][demux] Stream is not seekable.
[   1.580][v][demux] Opening segment 0...
[   1.580][v][stream_callback] Opening https://<whatever>.m3u8
[   1.580][v][ffmpeg] Opening https://<whatever>.m3u8
[   1.580][d][ffmpeg] tcp: Starting connection attempt to <some_ip> port 443
[   1.606][d][ffmpeg] tcp: Successfully connected to <some_ip> port 443
[   1.653][w][ffmpeg] https: HTTP error 403 Forbidden
[   1.653][e][stream] Failed to open https://<whatever>.m3u8.
[   1.653][e][demux] EDL: Could not open source file 'https://<whatever>.m3u8'.

So I have a few questions:

1. Is there a way I can avoid mpv doing any data fetching with ffmpeg? And offload all data fetching to yt-dlp? If I could do that, I might still run into the issue that mpv doesn't have information about the HLS stream such as the length (for seeking), but I'm not sure on this.
2. This might be off topic, but is there a way I can setup curl impersonation on ffmpeg as well? This would be most ideal.

Less ideal workaround that I have at the moment:

I can run yt-dlp manually and pipe the output to mpv, which works, except that mpv has no concept of the fact that it's an HLS stream and therefore doesn't know the length of the stream, etc.

yt-dlp <some_url> --impersonate chrome -o - | mpv -

---

Note: This is similar to #16684, but not the same solution since in my case, the individual segments are also protected behind Cloudflare.

[na-na-hi]

No. And I doubt it will ever be supported in ffmpeg. (It still doesn't support HTTP 2/3.)

@kasper93 thoughts? Adding native curl to mpv would solve this, support newer versions of HTTP, and also fix #3373. At the current state, there are multiple easy ways for video servers to completely block ffmpeg/mpv from streaming any video.

Considering that most ffmpeg users only use the demuxer and codec parts of it while using other libraries for networking, I think there is not enough motivation for a ffmpeg implementation.

[kasper93]

I have stream_http.c based on curl mostly finished, but I'm not pushing it, because I'm sure there will be some weird issues with not seekable streams or other servers weirdness, which I don't really have time to work on in timely manner at this moment. At least for youtube it works fine.

As for ffmpeg, I doubt it would be accepted there. There was some discussion and there was not much enthusiasm. ffmpeg is mostly focused on processing.