Downloading a .m3u8 file with ffmpeg

# If you are putting all sources from file, 

```bash
 ffmpeg -i file.m3u8 -codec copy output.mp4
```

# If you are downloading from a website you have to add the protocols it will be using

This list should work
```bash
ffmpeg -protocol_whitelist file,https,tcp,tls,crypto -i file.m3u8 -codec copy output.mp4 
```

# If you are downloading from a website manually and putting them together.

We assume the m3u8 file doesn't have aes encryption applied to it.


```bash
# Make a new directory, since there is going to be a lot of files

mkdir <dirname>
cd <dirname>
# Find the m3u8 file (Sometimes it is base64 encoded, and place it in `file.m3u8`)
# place it inside the folder.
# Modify the file adding the <https://...> absolute url
aria2c -x 10 -s 10 -i file.m3u8

# Modify the file removing all comments, leaving only the file names (save it on files.txt)

cat $(grep -v '^#' files.txt) > output.ts


# I prefer to do this manually, just to make sure there was no neferiaous information or link, since we are publishing this code on a public gist
```

## Note on getting .m3u8

Many times, a m3u8 file that you download is not accessible again from the same url.

In that case, open the dev console and wait for that video to start and then pause javascript execution, and look through all the requests the one that is the m3u8. The response within the developer tools should contain the whole content of the file in the response, that you can just copy paste into a file locally (And review it if you don't trust it...)



## Alternatives

An alternative is `aria2c` which has multiconnections etc. https://aria2.github.io

See https://gist.github.com/patrickgill/130bf9eaa76138596137c7234e80f339

# download
aria2c -x 5 -i file.m3u8

# join all ts files
cat *.ts > out.ts

# convert ts output file
# This will re-encode the video and stream copy the audio:
# ffmpeg -i input -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc output.mp4
ffmpeg -i d_out.ts-vcodec copy -acodec copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc d_out.mp4