Ripping a video from a website

If your browser indicates that any kind of DRM is in use, such as WideVine or FairPlay, these instructions will not be sufficient, as those videos are encrypted.

If a website has a video you'd like to download, try the obvious methods first:

• If it's a regular full video file, in most browsers you can simply download it via right-clicking on the video and saving it. Firefox has a useful Page Info tool, which you can open via Tools → Page Info that also shows all media on the site (in the Media tab).
• Attempt to download the video via yt-dlp (previously yt-dl.

If both options fail, my manual method is to open the page in Firefox, and open the Network tool (from the web developer tools).

When you load the video, you will see that a bunch of files are downloaded. First, a playlist file should be downloaded, followed by short video files (which are parts of the video you want to download). The playlist file often has the extensions .m3u or .m3u8. Sometimes .mpd is also used.

When you think you have identified the playlist, you can try to play it directly with ffplay (from the ffmpeg suite):

ffplay https://server.com/playlist.m3u8

The video should then play.The Open Network option in VLC can also play such playlists.

If this is indeed the video you want, you can now download it with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i "https://server.com/playlist.m3u8" -c copy output.mp4

The video should now be saved into output.mp4. You can adjust the ffmpeg command to use specific codecs or other options if needed. Alternatively, you can use VLC's stream output option to save the video.