Author here: for some sites, that approach works well, and this is what I originally did (and why I decided to write streamsh in bash). Have a look in the "tricks" directory and you'll see some of the much simpler solutions that are tried first. However, an increasing number of sites try to hide the URL, and through increasingly complicated means. The article is about vidbull.com, but there are others. They often also layer multiple obfuscators (vidbull uses both JS obfuscation and URL encryption for example). While it's true you can get pretty far just by scanning for mp4s on some mirrors, they are becoming fewer and farther between.
vidbull looks more like the old "file storage locker" sites that were popular before the megaupload crackdown. Isn't this the same content you can find using torrent sites? Is it likely that vidbull would have something for which no torrent would ever exist? Sorry for my ignorance.
No no, there are torrents for all of these videos (at least usually). However, torrents are slightly less convenient in that you can't play the file until the download completes. For me personally it's also an upside that HTTP is easier to proxy, and there's no need to seed. That said, torrents will probably be a better solution for many people. If you're interested, I wrote a tool a while back that scanned torrent sites for the newest episode of a particular show and automatically downloaded and started the torrent: https://github.com/jonhoo/smore. No idea if it still works, but shouldn't be too hard to get it up and running again.
