About possibility to download .m3u8 format streaming videos

[Rexxon]

Some video streaming sites are streaming videos in .m3u8 format.
i.e. one could see videos, but VSO Downloader does not recognize that
streaming format for video download.

/Looks like some streaming sites are making all possible, to avoid videos being downloaded!!!/

Have you planned to develop VSO Downloader for possible .m3u8 streaming
video format download, and if yes - is there planned a converting to .mp4
within VSO Downloader?

[Maggie]

Hi Rexxon,
Could you please give me one or various links?
We'll check it out asap.
Cheers,

[Rexxon]

In log file just with red -

28 juuli 15:38:15 | Protocol not yet supported (DL_HLS)

In some streams - protocol not yet supported, in other (special test) streams -
https://ottverse.com/free-hls-m3u8-test-urls/

File downloaded with error - in download folder is executed a mp4 file - size 1 kB
VLC player could not play it.
and a m3u8 file size 2 kb.
example - when m3u8 file opened with Notepad -

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:1
## Created with Unified Streaming Platform (version=1.10.24-21823)

# variants
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=493000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2,avc1.66.30",RESOLUTION=224x100,FRAME-RATE=24
tears-of-steel-audio_eng=64008-video_eng=401000.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=932000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2,avc1.66.30",RESOLUTION=448x200,FRAME-RATE=24
tears-of-steel-audio_eng=128002-video_eng=751000.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=1197000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2,avc1.77.31",RESOLUTION=784x350,FRAME-RATE=24
tears-of-steel-audio_eng=128002-video_eng=1001000.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=1727000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2,avc1.100.40",RESOLUTION=1680x750,FRAME-RATE=24,VIDEO-RANGE=SDR
tears-of-steel-audio_eng=128002-video_eng=1501000.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=2468000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2,avc1.100.40",RESOLUTION=1680x750,FRAME-RATE=24,VIDEO-RANGE=SDR
tears-of-steel-audio_eng=128002-video_eng=2200000.m3u8

# variants
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=68000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2"
tears-of-steel-audio_eng=64008.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=136000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2"
tears-of-steel-audio_eng=128002.m3u8



And - my version, as you know is VSO Downloader Ultimate - 5.0.1.51

[Rexxon]

URL: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream
- source - http://nasatv-lh.akamaihd.net/i/NASA_10 ... aster.m3u8

Log file -

28 juuli 16:49:29 | Unsupported stream not compatible with 3rd party tool.
28 juuli 16:49:26 | Protocol not yet supported (DL_HLS)
28 juuli 16:49:26 | conversion (0 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | renamer (3 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | referrer title (0 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | conversion (2 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | temporary (0 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | original (0 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | download (2 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | temporary (0 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | original (0 event(s))
28 juuli 16:49:26 | player (0 event(s))



Just interested - because SpaceX Crew Dragon is ready to come back
from ISS to Earth on August 2.

[jschmoyer]

In log file just with red -

28 juuli 15:38:15 | Protocol not yet supported (DL_HLS)

In some streams - protocol not yet supported, in other (special test) streams -
https://ottverse.com/free-hls-m3u8-test-urls/

FWIW

Using Downloader Ultimate 5.1.1.71, Windows 10 Build 20180
My Downloader Ultimate is set for "Do Not Convert"
From the above link files 1-4 and 6-7 downloaded fine and were mp4 files.
All downloaded as "unknown file name" and plated without error on Windows Media Player

From the above link files 5 and 8-13 did not download.
All show "requested format not available" error in the log and unknown file name and "ext" as the extension in "properties".

Hope that info helps

EDIT: All files played without incidents in Edge from https://ottverse.com/free-hls-m3u8-test-urls/ and http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream
But the feed from http://nasatv-lh.akamaihd.net/i/NASA_10 ... aster.m3u8 was not available

[achugh]

I'm facing a similar problem. I am using 5.1.1.70 version with the latest engine downloaded and have configured DO NOT CONVERT option as well. Because m3u8 file contains multiple streams, the browser is downloading lot of them in the background and VSO Downloader is downloading all of them as well. However, in my case, it is only downloading the AUDIO streams and saving them as AAC files. Even though I can see the video in the browser, VSO does not detect and hence does not download them. I have tried Firefox 81 and Chrome 86 on Windows 10 version 2004.

I wanted to download https://app.pluralsight.com/course-play ... 14b91f1198

When you play this URL in the browser, you see the player requesting MASTER.M3U8 which contains other M3U8 files for various resolutions.

Can the support folks take a look and add support for this player to download content please?

[Maggie]

Hi guys,

Just asked our dev, and our next version (we are working on!) will support way better DLHLS (dash, m3u8)!

Cheers,

[Rexxon]

Hi guys,

Just asked our dev, and our next version (we are working on!) will support way better DLHLS (dash, m3u8)!

Cheers,

Great news! Thank you, Maggie!

[achugh]

Looking forward to the next version.

In the mean time I found that for basic downloads, you can install "Stream Recorder - download HLS as MP4" chrome extension into your Chrome browser and it allows you to download these HLS videos as MP4 files. This extension is provided by https://www.hlsloader.com

Without this extension I was able to add video/MP2T as an active filter via registry change which allowed me to download the TS video file via VSO Downloader. VSO Downloader is already able to download AAC files. I was not able to combine these two downloaded files as the DL HLS splits the video and audio files. All my attempts to combine the video and audio into MP4 container failed so far which is when I found this free chrome extension that works at the moment while we wait for VSO Downloader to get ready.

[achugh]

For anyone watching this thread, the current version 1.3.1 of "Stream Recorder - download HLS as MP4" has a defect where the resulting MP4 it creates is 20 times the size it needs to be. I hope the developers of this extension figure out the defect and make this extension useful. For now it is not helping me out and so my search continues.

In the meantime, I found that VSO Downloader already uses ffmpeg for video conversion as this open source utility is installed in the installation folder. I learnt the syntax and its features and found that this command line utility can do muxing of audio and video stream into a new container which is much faster than converting (or technically referred as transcoding).

The following command can be used to create a valid MP4 file from the HLS TS Video Stream and AAC Audio stream when video and audio are downloaded as a separate files. Assuming you downloaded the video file as VIDEO.TS and the downloaded audio file is called AUDIO.AAC, we can put them together into an MP4 file called OUTPUT.MP4 using the following command.

ffmpeg -i VIDEO.TS -i AUDIO.AAC -c:v copy -c:a copy OUTPUT.mp4

For the developers of VSO Downloader, I have encountered bad M3U8 files as well. What I mean by that is the M3U8 playlist file will have bunch of URLs in it, where every URL points to the complete AUDIO or VIDEO file but has different query string parameters that are used for analytics and tracking by the website. In these situations, VSO Downloader should really check the total size of the downloaded file against the total bytes that need to be downloaded so that VSO Downloader does not try to combine multiple segments of audio and video which results in the final file being much bigger and a repetition of content. In other words, I saw that 2 mins video and audio file was split into 30 splits using 4 second as the TARGETDURATION. But each split is a complete file and is not really a split. For these broken or special implementations, I recommend the VSO Downloader development team to check the size of the file against the M3U8 bytes to avoid issue.