Needed a local copy of a video posted to social media, and realized today I already had the tools to obtain it.

Requirements

  • FFmpeg
  • Web browser
  1. Open the page containing the video. Do not start playing the video yet
  2. Open the browser’s dev tools and click to the Network tab
  3. (Optional) Set the filter to “Media”
  4. Start playing the video
  5. Look in the network tab for the first network request that references an .m3u8 file.
  6. Copy that URL
  7. Run ffmpeg -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls,crypto -i "https://url-you-copied/file.m3u8" -c copy output_filiename.mp4

That’s it.