Writing a Python Script to Download M3U8 Streams

The m3u8 Python library makes it easy to parse and download HLS streams:

import m3u8
import requests

# Parse the playlist
playlist = m3u8.load('https://example.com/stream.m3u8')

# Download all segments
segments = []
for segment in playlist.segments:
    resp = requests.get(segment.uri)
    segments.append(resp.content)

# Merge and save
with open('output.ts', 'wb') as f:
    for seg in segments:
        f.write(seg)

A more complete script with progress tracking:

import m3u8, requests, os
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor

def download_m3u8(url, output="output.mp4"):
    playlist = m3u8.load(url)
    base_url = "/".join(url.split("/")[:-1]) + "/"
    
    def fetch_seg(seg):
        seg_url = seg.uri if seg.uri.startswith("http") else base_url + seg.uri
        resp = requests.get(seg_url)
        return resp.content
    
    print(f"Downloading {len(playlist.segments)} segments...")
    with ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=8) as executor:
        data = list(executor.map(fetch_seg, playlist.segments))
    
    print("Merging...")
    with open(output, 'wb') as f:
        for seg_data in data:
            f.write(seg_data)
    print(f"Saved to {output}")

For production use, it's easier to call FFmpeg from Python:

import subprocess

def download_m3u8(url, output="output.mp4"):
    cmd = [
        'ffmpeg', '-i', url,
        '-c', 'copy',
        '-bsf:a', 'aac_adtstoasc',
        output
    ]
    subprocess.run(cmd, check=True)

download_m3u8('https://example.com/stream.m3u8')