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
- Open the page containing the video. Do not start playing the video yet
- Open the browser’s dev tools and click to the Network tab
- (Optional) Set the filter to “Media”
- Start playing the video
- Look in the network tab for the first network request that references an
.m3u8file. - Copy that URL
- 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.
Yeah, I saw the steps for VLC and they’re similar. I tend to prefer CLI, so that’s what I did / wrote up.
Yeah I feel more comfortably just typing the commands instead of trying to find my way through a gui