Is there an extension that brings this button back?
I know publishers hate this, but publishers don't exactly have a good track record of treating their user well. Non-copyable text, hijacking right click. Regardless of how they feel it's all workaroundable (inspect) but still a hostile user experience.
I use to ensure devtools > Networking is open when I press play (or reload the tab if it's autoplaying). If it's streaming the timeline should make it obvious which resource it's about. Then just right click on the item and "Open in new tab" or even Save (I don't remember if it's an option). When in a new tab, just save the page as the page will be the media file itself.
FYI, this level of interference is trivially circumvented using several of the possible alternative methods for serving video, even without applying actual DRM wrappers.
>publishers don't exactly have a good track record of treating their user well
That's an overly broad and vague statement to excuse entitlement. I'm fine with downloading content that's publicly available, but not because "they had it coming."
I know publishers hate this, but publishers don't exactly have a good track record of treating their user well. Non-copyable text, hijacking right click.
And why did publishers start playing those games? Because too many visitors were abusing the trust they had before.
Regardless of how they feel it's all workaroundable (inspect)
Not in this case. There are plenty of alternative ways to serve video content that aren't easily copied through any standard browser tools. Every single one of them is more user-hostile and more at risk of breaking something useful than using plain ol' HTML5 video elements where most people aren't going to abuse them even if technically they could.
Yes, but then you have to catch the request and it's far more effort than just pressing a download button.
I find the request window especially hard to use on sites with a lot of assets (e.g. SoundCloud loading a million avatars for a song) as the performance slows to a crawl.
It should be easy even to write a bookmarklet that walks the DOM, finds the video element, and opens the source in a new window. And it would work in all browsers.
This doesn't work if the video element has a streaming source or if the video is being rendered using something other than a plain HTML5 video element.
Hijacking these controls as a way to prevent copying/inspecting used to be far more prevalent. For the most part these days it's not done to intentionally interfere with these actions, but rather as a misguided attempt to replace core functionality with something supposedly more "user friendly / beneficial".
The worst offender now is the applying of click event handlers for links that simply navigate to a URL. The inability to open a link in a new tab only because the developer chose to use a <span>/<div>/<li> that triggers a javascript framework routing action, instead of using an <a> tag pointing at that route... sigh.
I know publishers hate this, but publishers don't exactly have a good track record of treating their user well. Non-copyable text, hijacking right click. Regardless of how they feel it's all workaroundable (inspect) but still a hostile user experience.