[FFmpeg-user] Slow HLS Stream Download FFmpeg

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 15:49:47 -0600, Gabriel Altabarani wrote:
> I can successfully download a HLS stream from a .m3u8 link. However, the
> problem that I am facing is extremely slow download speeds. When using
> Streamlink <https://streamlink.github.io/>  I can download any stream at
> least three times faster than FFmpeg. In Streamlink there is an option,
> "--hls-segment-threads <count>", to specify the size of the thread pool used
> to download HLS segments. The result is an increased download speed. My
> question is, is there something equivalent in FFmpeg or something that I can
> do to utilize my full connection speed?

Yes, how about Streamlink then. ;-)

No, honestly, ffmpeg isn't made to download in parallel, as it needs to
process the video sequentially anyway. It *could* buffer, but it
doesn't.

youtube-dl comes to mind. It has its own code for downloading and
reassembling playlists such as m3u8 and f4m (though it does prefer to
use ffmpeg for m3u8 sometimes). At first glance, it also doesn't do
parallel downloads, but I'm sure its code could be enhanced to do so.
In fact, it already has such feature requests:
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/3746
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/350
(and several more).

Moritz