A proxy web app that serves ABC iView content outside of the iView webplayer, avoiding intrusive data harvesting.

Related tags

Node.js HTTP iview-proxy

Overview

iview-proxy

A proxy web app that serves ABC iView content outside of the iView webplayer, avoiding intrusive data harvesting.

There's also a cool Android fork located here.

Notes

Privacy Badger blocks the playback URL of ABC iView video playlists because of cross-origin playback, so whitelist that URL when it's flagged otherwise videos will refuse to play.

Purpose

This project has two main goals:

Avoid as much account authentication as possible to watch ABC iView content,
Avoid providing as much data as possible to iView to stop data harvesting.

Despite being aptly warned, the ABC has taken a forceful approach to collecting ABC iView data. This app seeks to remedy this by obtaining iView medias' m3u8 playlists, and isolating them to a locked-down media player, completely free of any analytics tracking.

How does it work?

Search

The search function on iView is riddled with analytics tracking:

{
	"requests": [
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		},
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&hitsPerPage=6&filters=docType%3A%20category%20OR%20docType%3A%20channel&ruleContexts=iview_categories&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		},
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&hitsPerPage=8&filters=docType%3A%20Program&ruleContexts=iview_programs&page=0&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		},
		{
			"indexName": "ABC_production_iview_web",
			"params": "highlightPreTag=%3Cais-highlight-0000000000%3E&highlightPostTag=%3C%2Fais-highlight-0000000000%3E&getRankingInfo=true&clickAnalytics=true&analytics=true&userToken=anonymous-60451354-4525-401b-9a54-3e18fa480cd5&facetFilters=playable%3A%20-false&query=s&hitsPerPage=8&filters=docType%3A%20VideoEpisode%20AND%20NOT%20subType%3A%20feature%20AND%20NOT%20subType%3A%20livestream&ruleContexts=iview_episodes&page=0&facets=%5B%5D&tagFilters="
		}
	]
}

So iview-proxy disables it all, and locks down iView's search to the bare-minimum, keeping your data safe.

Watching

When you watch a video on the normal iView site, all sorts of data is sent back to iView and third parties, which is concerning to those who care about their privacy. See here.

iview-proxy calls only show/series metadata APIs to get the video info, and acts as if it is a web scraper of sorts. Once it has the video source for a show, it plays it in a non-custom video.js player, completely free of any analytics tracking.

Node JS

Download and install Node JS from here
Verify its installation by opening a terminal (or CMD/PowerShell for Windows users), and run this command:
```
node
```
You should enter the Node JS interpreter.

Type
```
.exit
```
to leave.

Setup

The actual app is contained in the src directory.

Install required dependencies
```
npm install
```
Start the server
```
npm start
```
or
```
node .
```
Navigate to localhost:1984 in a browser to access the app.

Comments

Docker image

This pull request adds a Dockerfile so that you can build a docker image for it.

It builds fine with the automated builds with Dockerhub if you want to set that up.

I did an automated build here: https://hub.docker.com/r/gdunstone/iview-proxy

opened by gdunstone 4
Most news is unavailable

I get a 503 from iviewhlsvod-vh.akamaihd.net for most "news" type content.

I am not sure why.

For example clip with id TASM202013384710 - ABC News Tasmania Extras - Taste of Tasmania festival future in doubt

opened by gdunstone 1
Fix invalid HTML
Fix error: missing doctype in index & show

Fix error: missing head title element in index

Fix warning: missing lang attribute in index & show

Both index and show HTML now fully validate with no warnings according to https://validator.w3.org/.
opened by yawnoc 0
fix for undefined in search results

Sometimes the iview api returns results that dont actually exist, ie they dont have an id or title, this results in 'undefined' entries in the search results.

opened by gdunstone 0
CORS problems when anywhere other than localhost

When hosting this on anything other than localhost, I get CORS errors when viewing a show.

I get CORS Missing Allow Origin.

I dont think that doing the API requests from the browser is the best idea. The server app should also act as a proxy for the browsers API calls.

opened by gdunstone 7
gigya SSO

this will need to deal with the gigya SSO : https://help.sap.com/viewer/8b8d6fffe113457094a17701f63e3d6a/GIGYA/en-US/417f1e0c70b21014bbc5a10ce4041860.html

which i assume will be included on every webpage in iview, it hasnt been turned on yet. example js include is here: https://cdns.au1.gigya.com/js/gigya.js?apikey=3_MUpFPmfqHoGIK_YD3Lt6Oi23Gm3bsK7MrbeCdfynaGVwVB8yX_Hwaq4_S9Nk0fZF

yt-dl does have a login capability, but that isn't the point huh.

opened by kaputnikGo 4