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I am trying to download video from a .m3u8 livestream video format.

How can I download m3u8 videos using software on my personal computer such as ffmpeg, youtube-dl, VLC, etc?

M3U is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. One common use of the M3U file format is creating a single-entry playlist file pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and is often used in downloads from a website, for emailing, and for listening to Internet radio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U

pkamb
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FarouK
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/71904/discussion-on-question-by-farouk-downloading-m3u8-videos). – Journeyman Geek Jan 19 '18 at 03:40
  • I've made a cross platform desktop application for this purpose. https://github.com/dotnettools/SharpGrabber – Javid Feb 13 '21 at 21:09
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    this question is being discussed on Meta: https://meta.superuser.com/questions/14603/why-is-this-question-about-downloading-an-m3u8-video-file-off-topic – pkamb Dec 30 '21 at 19:26

1 Answers1

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Get FFmpeg, then you can download your video with this command:

ffmpeg -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls,crypto -i "http://s6.vidshare.tv/hls/pdommq4tlsm4f4kmledsh5d5fcn27i35msjxqw62lfflut5bgaqhb5kirb5q/index-v1-a1.m3u8" -c copy video.mp4

But it may be easier to use youtube-dl. If it supports the website that contains the video you can type e.g.:

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/...

This works not just for YouTube but also many other video sites.

M. Justin
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Tesseract
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