NOTE: If nothing comes up when filtering m3u8 in the network tab try “mp4” and sometimes the different URL’s will be for different qualities so pay notice to this. Save it and then double click it to download the video! Next, go to the streaming site from where you want to download and grab the M3U8 video URL. To start off, download and install FFmpeg if you havent already. All you have to do is execute a single line command. Since most of all the video streaming services use web-optimized video MP4 format, we are going to download M3U8 video files with FFmpeg and convert them to MP4 format. Now open up your FFmpeg batch command and past the link as the input (-i) and since mostly these videos are short you’re going to want lossless quality so a batch command like this is ideal: ffmpeg -i '' -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 22 'saveas.mp4' Downloading HLS videos with FFmpeg is way easier than you think. Now click play on the video and you should see some URL’s pop up.ĩ times out of 10 it will be the first URL and/or the one that has “master” in it, right click this and click copy. Now click on the network tab, type in “m3u8” and make sure ‘all’ is selected. vf scale: Specifies the width and height of the output video, with a height of -1 representing proportional auto-fit. c:v: Specify the encoder, the list of encoders can be viewed using ffmpeg-codecs. The above command transcodes the input video to h264 encoded video.

Navigate to the website or video page and open up the developer console, either by right clicking and clicking “inspect” or pressing ctrl+shift+i ffmpeg -i -c:v libx264 -b:v 2048k -vf scale1280:-1 -y .

FFmpeg is an open source command line tool that can be used to process video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. I like to use Chrome for this as I find their developer tools easier to handle than firefoxes. Creating a video slideshow of images with FFmpeg. IF you don’t know or have FFmpeg installed here is the post for you, otherwise follow along to learn how to grab videos from news or sports websites.

Ffmpeg download video