[FFmpeg-user] Can ffmpeg record video from this kind of URL?

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2021 at 08:14:02 +0200, Bo Berglund wrote:
> How do I extract the proper m3u8 URL from the webpage in the best/safest way?
> Some of these pages display a scrolling long list of items when one presses the
> F12 function key in FireFox and it is not obvious to me what I should try.
> And there are also URL:s ending with .ts in that scrolling list, but these
> change all the time so they are probably just short sections of the video,
> right?
>
> Is there a command line call I can make to extract the m3u8 URL automatically so
> it can be used in a script only supplied the main page URL?

There's often a lot of magic involved in extracting the video URLs from
webpages - parsing JavaScript, downloading and parsing JSON files,
re-using cookies and referrers, and so on. Please do use the tool
youtube-dl, or the maintained fork yt-dlp, to extract these URL or even
to download the actual videos. The tool figures out the formats, the
URLs, and often even the de-encryption (not DRM though) of many many
web pages. (It can even call ffmpeg to download, and will do so by
default in many cases.)

To get the (or a) URL:
$ youtube-dl -g http://website-of-choice/page

If youtube-dl doesn't support a certain page, I load the page in Chrome
and look for the original file or m3u8 on the Network tab of the
developer console (Ctrl+Shift+C), and then pass that to ffmpeg.

Cheers,
Moritz