TLDR: what tool will let a casual user to input a URL (to a disguised .m3u8 file) and get a .mp4?
Backstory, our school uses Panopto to record lectures. The web interface is crap, but I found a project that lets you download the video files as .mp4
https://programming.dev/post/21072323
that is until 2 weeks ago when Panopto started exporting the files as
- 1 large
.panobf1file - 2 small
.panobf2files, a few bytes each
I can swap the file extension for the .panobf1 file to .mp4. This is enough 90% of the time. However, since this is the file with the classroom camera overlaid on the slides, it blocks the content in the corner.
Investigating the .panobf2 files:
❯ file master.panobf2
master.panobf2: M3U playlist, ASCII text
I ran this command on each .panobf2 file to download the classroom stream and slides stream as separate mp4 files.
ffmpeg -i <file-url> -c copy video.mp4
It’s finals season and I want to make a new post to help people out. CLI isn’t for everyone, so I’m looking for a tool instead
yt-dlp can download m3u8 playlists AFAIK
I was going to suggest this but I couldn’t say it’s “casual user” friendly. That said, there is no better utility.
There are many GUIs for yt-dlp.
Stacher is what I use. Makes things very easy.
It looks nice, but is it still open source?
That is a fair question. I honestly have no idea.
I use Parabolic on Linux and YTDLnis on Android. I chose them because of the consistency of design with the OS.
I missed that in the OP.
That’s alright, it started the discussion and I learned about the GUIs
Not strictly user-friendly but this how I usually do it with this ONE command:
ffmpeg -allowed_extensions ALL -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls,crypto -i PLAYLIST.m3u -codec copy OUTPUT.mp4CLI is the way.
Don’t rely on a black box, build a transparent box.
VLC might work, testing nowIt’s slow to get started compared to ffmpegConvert and save grabbed the audio only, need to play with it more
Have you checked JDownloader. I think it may work. Haven’t tested though.
It looks old, but I will try it and report back
