Download subtitles (and videos) from Naver V Live, manually

---➤ Update 4

Reader Apricot Rose pointed out something I forgot to update this post with: Naver V Live has been discontinued as a product itself. However, Weverse (formerly from Big Hit, now known as HYBE) is a decent replacement, or else you can find K-pop content on Naver NOW. The powerful Soshistagram converter is still up and running for Weverse content!

---➤ Update 3

Reader Aeri suggests another new method, which other readers confirmed as working:

Hello! I'm going to share the NEW manual method of downloading the video and/or subs after finally figuring it out~ They made it slightly more complicated by adding an extra step. This time round at the "Network" tab, instead of searching for "mp4", search for "vod_play_videoInfo" and open the entire link in a new tab. This contains all the information regarding the video, and you can search for all the "mp4" links in it. You can also opt to search by "144", "270", "360", "480", "720" or "1080" to locate the exact links of the video size you desire. On the same page, you'll also be able to locate the WebVTT links by searching for "English" (or whichever the language you're looking for). This should solve all your problems. Hope this helps! Cheers!

---➤ Update 2

Reader Luna Twinks gives another suggestion:

Guys. Why do problematic. Install an extension in Chrome called '' Video Downloader ''. The tutorial of the app will explain everything. Then, use the old method. Don't search .VTT, but only '' captions ''. And continue the tutorial. After downloading the video and its subs you wanted, convert the subs on the site '' nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/Online# ". It's very easy trust me.
So, the actual situation : you've downloaded the video with '' Video Downloader '' on Chrome (or Firefox, as if you want) AND the subs after searching '' captions '' and downloaded the first link. (As in the tutorial above).
Don't forget to put a name on your .VTT file and save it in a folder you'll remember.
SO, NOW, you're on nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/Online# . Click on '' Subtitle '' on the top at your left.
Then click '' Open ''.
A window will appear, please choose the .VTT File.
WARNING, don't change ANY settings. Just let it at default. We never know what will happen.
Click on '' Load Subtitle ''.
Finally, reclick on '' Subtitle '' and click on '' Save/Download '', a window will appear. Choose the format '' srt '', and click on ''Save/download" just below.
The subtitles are downloading.
SO ! WAS IT HELPFUL ? I HOPE SO ! Please tell me if you have any problem with the tuto I made. Hope manhi manhi people will see it.

---➤ Update 1

Reader Ani Chen shared a new method and even included a video to show how it's done:

Guys... I think I found out how to download the video. Vlive definitely did something to it. I seriously spent two hours playing around with it. . I don't know about code either, a little bit I admit I used to take computer programming basics but I used mostly logic to figure it out lol. I don't know about subs but I'll tell you how to here when I find time to figure it out.
This is ch+ vid
Watch here: http://dai.ly/x5rodnlPassword: seokjin

---

Original post update from July 2017 follows below. 
However, some of the information is now out of date. 
So please check the updates above for the best possible method.

New way of downloading (?) V Live videos

The downloading method in my original post won't work for many V Live videos anymore. But there is still a way to do it. Sort of. Please read all the way through before you start, because this method isn't fully working.

Background

Starting a month or two ago, Naver changed the way new  V Live videos are streamed. They no longer use one convenient video file we can download (like an .mp4 file). Instead, many V Live videos (especially newer ones) are now broken into many small "chunks" of 4 seconds each (multiple .ts files)

This makes it more difficult to download these newer V Live videos. It's still possible, but more work. I'm sure you can notice many, many .ts files downloading while you stream the video (if you're familiar with my old method below). Now, you need to find the .m3u8 file for the video. That is the keyfile. That file is a playlist of all the various .ts files. These are all the pieces of your video. You could download them all manually, but that could be 100s of video pieces for one single V Live video.

Method: Get the .m3u8

Here's a screenshot showing what you need to do. Notice it's very similar to my old method, so if you're confused, read the old method. First do this:

1. Go to the video page. For my example, http://www.vlive.tv/video/33227
2. Open Chrome Developer Tools (Ctrl-Shift-I)
3. Click the "Network" tab
4. Reload the page

Finding the m3u8 playlist in a Naver V Live video

Now do this, like in the screenshot above:

1. (A) Make sure you're in the "Network" tab
2. (B) Type ".m3u8" in the box
3. (C) Right click the file that appears, and copy its URL

For my example video, the URL was http://globalv.p.naverrmc.edgesuite.net/global/read/global_v_2017_06_17_3/56afqWtk6ti_3ynhN0OyMrNV7Q_rmcvideo_1080P_1920_5120_192.m3u8?__gda__=1498923587_59ec587a67e0aa1dfdbde7985e762f3c

You could also download that file, but if you open it, you'll see just a list of all the .ts files that make up the video.

Problem: putting the pieces together

Now normally, I would suggest just pasting the URL into a video player like VLC. It can usually stream .m3u8 links, and then you can just tell VLC to convert the stream to an .mp4 file.

But... I couldn't get that to work with this V Live link. Maybe because it's not just your average M3U8, but extended. Try VLC if you want, and see if you can get it to work. If you do, let me know!

So instead, you'll need some other way of downloading all those .tc files and stitching them back together. A desktop app like these might work:

• Allavsoft M3U8 Downloader - Download and Convert M3U8 to MP4, WMV, AVI, FLV, MOV, etc. on Mac and Windows
• m3u8x 1.082 Download Free - VideoHelp

There's always the psychopath way, if you really want it:

1. Let the entire video load.
2. Search ".ts" instead of .m3u8
3. Download each of those files
4. Combine them into one video file (VLC can do this).

I call it the "psychopath way" because a 4 minute V Live video would have 60 .ts files, and you'd need to download them all, in order, and combine them, in order. 

Good luck!

As you can see, Naver is making it very hard to download these videos, probably because they don't want them re-uploaded to YouTube or etc. For now then, I think the "manual" way of doing it is just too bothersome. Just try one of the other ways.

---

My original post, from February 2017, is below. The method below will still work for some older V Live videos uploaded before mid-2017. I'll leave it here, but for new videos it likely won't work.

---

Old method for manually downloading V Live videos

(Original post starts here)

Here are two ways to download from Naver 🤞 V Live. I will focus on the subtitles, but at the end will mention how to use this for videos too.

First, I'll review the simple way: using Soshistagram
Second, I'll show the harder manual way, using only Chrome browser

Easy way - Download Naver V subs/videos with Soshistagram

Reminder that the easiest way is just to use Soshistagram's simple Naver V downloader. From their website, you can just paste a video URL, and it will let you download the video (in a variety of size resolutions) and also the subtitles, with one click. Amazingly, they even convert the subtitle file for you into the popular SRT format. You should have no problems. Check out this picture. It couldn't be easier.

Downloading subtitles from Soshistagram's V Downloader

Seriously, just use Soshistagram, even if the name feels a little outdated now. One of my most popular posts was basically just a link to them. Plus it should work on mobile.

Manual way - Download Naver V subs manually with Chrome's developer tools

You can manually download the subtitle file, but it takes a little bit of work. Don't worry. It looks complicated, but it's not so bad.

Basically, we're just opening the built-in Dev Tools in Chrome, finding the VTT file in the Network tab, choosing the result from the URL that includes "caption", and that's the subtitle file.

If you didn't understand that, don't worry. Let's go through it step-by-step. For my example, I'm using the video at V LIVE - 4minute의 팬미팅 가는 길

Screenshot of the subtitle downloading process

Download process for Naver Vlive videos, using Chrome

Detailed instructions

1. Open the video page.
   Example: http://www.vlive.tv/video/1981
2. Open Chrome's developer tools
   3 dot menu → "More tools..." → "Developer Tools" or Ctrl-Shift-I
3. Go to the "Network" tab
   It's in the top menu of this new side window. You may need to click the "»" to expand the menu more
4. Make sure the little circle is red
   (#1 in my screenshot)
5. Type "vtt" in the search box
   (#2 in my screenshot)
6. Click each search result
   They will open in the right-side window, where the big red circle in my screenshot is
7. Find the result that has the word "caption" near the link's beginning
   (#3 in my screenshot). This is the subtitle!
8. Copy the link
   (everything in the circle in #4 in my screenshot)
9. Open the link in a new tab and save the file as .vtt 

If you get stuck on #5 and no results are loading, try reloading the page and trying again, or skipping ahead in the video. The point is: at least some of the subtitles need to be loading while we do this.

The resulting subtitle page in my example is here and looks like this:

WEBVTT
1
00:01:01.005 --> 00:01:02.350
- Is it on?
- Now we're on?
2
00:01:02.350 --> 00:01:04.334
- Any sound?
- Sound?
3
00:01:04.334 --> 00:01:06.981
- No sound?
- They couldn’t hear us at all.

[http://caption.rmcnmv.naver.net/globalv/global_meta/read/global_v_2015_09_19_5/531C04F3F31EF34C35E3B34413B007B3646_muploader_h_360P_640_1228_128-1442711475777_en_US.vtt?__gda__=1486928033_6c41b9cebc5600d95b26ecbc0ae12a1b&]

Here is what you'll see the subtitles file in Chrome:

Subtitles for Naver V

This is the file to save with any name and with the extension .vtt

Note: You could also have just skipped the URL copy/paste, and just move from the "Headers" tab to the "Preview" tab. You'll find the subtitles there too.

But wait. We are not done yet.

Subtitle conversion

If you download the subs manually like this, you probably can't play them yet. Naver uses a special format that most video players can't read. So, you need to convert these .vtt subtitles into a more popular format, like .srt. Soshistagram does this for you, but you can do it yourself too, either manually or with another program.

Manual conversion

1. Download the subtitles (WebVTT file, .vtt)
2. open with any text editor
3. Remove WEBVTT text
3. Navigate to Find and Replace
4. Replace . (dot) with , (comma) and apply to all
5. If you use triple points like these ... simply replace the ,,, with ... in Find and Replace and you'll get them back.
Converting Amara subtitles's WebVTT to SRT on Vimeo

Automatic conversion

Some programs will do the conversion for you, such as:

• Subtitle Edit Online
• GitHub - ysmoradi/SubtitleHelper: Some C# & JavaScript methods which are useful when you're working on subtitles (Captions) in your application
• How to Convert from webvtt to srt | Kirito Studio's Home

Works for videos too

This is a good method to learn because if Soshistagram ever goes down, you can still download the subtitles and videos yourself.

This whole process works basically the same for downloading the video manually too.
Just replace that .vtt search with .mp4 and you'll be able to find and easily download the video.

Final Thoughts

Of course there are other ways to grab videos and subtitles from online. I just prefer the manual way since I don't have to rely on any site that might go down at any time. Some of the other sites are listed at the top of my other post: Download videos from Naver "V" app

Hope this helps, and if you're here you might be interested in these posts too:

• 10원 Tips: Download videos from Naver "V" app on Android phones
• 10원 Tips: Download videos from Naver TVcast and other Korean streaming video sites