vsd 0.2.5

video stream downloader is a command line program to download video streams served over HTTP from websites, HLS and DASH playlists.

Features

• Capturing network requests and collecting .m3u8, .mpd and subtitles from websites and save them locally.
• Muxing streams to single video container using ffmpeg.
• Singular progress bar for complete download process like an normal file download with realtime file size estimations.
• Supports AES-128 and CENC playlists decryption.
• Supports HLS and DASH
• Supports downloading in multiple threads.
• GUI (maybe in future)
• Supports SAMPLE-AES playlist decryption.
• Live stream download (wip)

See More

Installation

Dependencies

• ffmpeg (optional, recommended) only required for transmuxing and transcoding streams.
• chrome / chromium (optional) only required for capture and collect subcommands.

Visit releases for prebuilt binaries. Download and extract archive and copy vsd binary to any path. Now add that path to your PATH environment variable. Build instructions can be found here.

Usage

For quick testing purposes you may use https://test-streams.mux.dev as direct input. These streams are used by hls.js for testing purposes.

• Downloading and saving HLS and DASH playlists to disk.

$ vsd save <url> -o video.mp4

• Collecting .m3u8 (HLS), .mpd (Dash) and subtitles from a website and saving them locally.

$ vsd collect <url>

Help

$ vsd --help

Download video streams served over HTTP from websites, HLS and DASH playlists

Usage: vsd.exe <COMMAND>

Commands:
  capture  Capture requests made to fetch playlists
  collect  Collect playlists and subtitles from a website and save them locally
  decrypt  Decrypt encrypted streams using keys
  extract  Extract subtitles embedded inside an mp4 file
  merge    Merge multiple segments to a single file
  save     Download and save HLS and DASH playlists to disk
  help     Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help information (use `--help` for more detail)
  -V, --version  Print version information

$ vsd save --help

Download and save HLS and DASH playlists to disk

Usage: vsd.exe save [OPTIONS] <INPUT>

Arguments:
  <INPUT>  http(s):// | .m3u8 | .m3u | .mpd | .xml

Options:
  -a, --alternative
          Download alternative audio or subtitles stream from playlist instead all streams. For
          downloading video stream only, use `--skip` flag
      --baseurl <BASEURL>
          Base url for all segments. Usually needed for local m3u8 file
  -d, --directory <DIRECTORY>
          Change directory path for temporarily downloaded files. By default current working
          directory is used
  -k, --key <<KID:(base64:)KEY>|(base64:)KEY>
          Decryption keys for decrypting CENC encrypted streams. Key value should be specified in
          hex. Use `base64:` prefix if key is in base64 format. Streams encrypted with a single key
          can use `--key base64:MhbcGzyxPfkOsp3FS8qPyA==` like key format. Streams encrypted with
          multiple keys can use `--key
          eb676abbcb345e96bbcf616630f1a3da:100b6c20940f779a4589152b57d2dacb like key format. This
          option can be used multiple times
  -o, --output <OUTPUT>
          Mux all downloaded streams to a video container (.mp4, .mkv, etc.) using ffmpeg. Note that
          existing files will be overwritten and downloaded streams will be deleted
      --prefer-audio-lang <PREFER_AUDIO_LANG>
          Preferred language when multiple audio streams with different languages are available.
          Must be in RFC 5646 format (eg. fr or en-AU). If a preference is not specified and
          multiple audio streams are present, the first one listed in the manifest will be
          downloaded
      --prefer-subs-lang <PREFER_SUBS_LANG>
          Preferred language when multiple subtitles streams with different languages are available.
          Must be in RFC 5646 format (eg. fr or en-AU). If a preference is not specified and
          multiple subtitles streams are present, the first one listed in the manifest will be
          downloaded
  -q, --quality <WIDTHxHEIGHT>
          Automatic selection of some standard resolution streams with highest bandwidth stream
          variant from playlist. possible values: [144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, hd, 1080p, fhd, 2k,
          1440p, qhd, 4k, 8k, highest, max, select-later] [default: select-later]
      --raw-prompts
          Raw style input prompts for old and unsupported terminals
      --retry-count <RETRY_COUNT>
          Maximum number of retries to download an individual segment [default: 15]
  -s, --skip
          Skip downloading and muxing alternative streams
  -t, --threads <THREADS>
          Maximum number of threads for parllel downloading of segments. Number of threads should be
          in range 1-16 (inclusive) [default: 5]
  -h, --help
          Print help information

Client Options:
      --cookies <COOKIES> <URL>
          Enable cookie store and fill it with some existing cookies. Example `--cookies "foo=bar;
          Domain=yolo.local" https://yolo.local`. This option can be used multiple times
      --enable-cookies
          Enable cookie store which allows cookies to be stored
      --header <KEY> <VALUE>
          Custom headers for requests. This option can be used multiple times
      --proxy-address <PROXY_ADDRESS>
          Set http or https proxy address for requests
      --user-agent <USER_AGENT>
          Update and set custom user agent for requests [default: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0;
          Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36"]

Alternatives

List of alternatives to vsd:

1. N_m3u8DL-RE is the best alternative to vsd. It also supports live playlist which vsd doesn't. It doesn't come with features like capture and collect. Also, CENC encrypted playlist decryption is slow.
2. N_m3u8DL-CLI is good but it is not cross platform.
3. m3u8-downloader is also good but it has very few customizable options.
4. webvideo-downloader opens websites using chrome and captures the m3u8 links and then downloads it. A similar functionality can achieved with vsd too by using capture and collect subcommands.
5. dash-mpd-cli is very good for downloading DASH playlists. Also most of the vsd functionalities for parsing and downloading DASH playlists is taken for it's main project.

License

Dual Licensed

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT)