Installation | Usage | Try Without Install
video stream downloader is a command line program to download video streams served over HTTP from websites, HLS and DASH playlists.
- 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-128andCENCplaylists decryption. - Supports HLS and DASH
- Supports downloading in multiple threads.
- GUI (maybe in future)
- Supports SAMPLE-AES playlist decryption.
- Live stream download (wip)
Dependencies
- ffmpeg (optional, recommended) only required for transmuxing and transcoding streams.
- chrome / chromium (optional) only required for
captureandcollectsubcommands.
Visit releases for prebuilt binaries. Download and extract archive and then copy vsd binary to any path. Now add that path to your PATH environment variable.
| Host | Architecture | Download |
|---|---|---|
| Android 7+ (Termux) | aarch64 | .tar.xz |
| Linux | aarch64 | .tar.xz |
| MacOS 11.7+ | aarch64 | .tar.xz |
| Windows | aarch64 | .zip |
| Linux | x86_64 | .tar.xz |
| MacOS 11.7+ | x86_64 | .tar.xz |
| Windows | x86_64 | .zip |
You can also install vsd through cargo by using this command.
cargo install vsdBuild instructions can be found here and changelog here.
Additionally, you can also install third party gui frontend created by theRealCataclysm.
- Downloading and saving HLS and DASH playlists to disk.
$ vsd save <url> -o video.mp4For testing purposes you can use streams from https://test-streams.mux.dev.
- Collecting .m3u8 (HLS), .mpd (Dash) and subtitles from a website and saving them locally.
$ vsd capture <url> --save$ vsd --helpDownload video streams served over HTTP from websites, DASH (.mpd) and HLS (.m3u8) playlists.
Usage: vsd.exe [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>
Commands:
capture Capture playlists and subtitles from a website
extract Extract subtitles from mp4 boxes
merge Merge multiple segments to a single file
save Download DASH and HLS playlists
help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
Options:
--color <COLOR> When to output colored text [default: auto] [possible values: auto, always, never]
-h, --help Print help
-V, --version Print version
$ vsd save --helpDownload DASH and HLS playlists
Usage: vsd.exe save [OPTIONS] <INPUT>
Arguments:
<INPUT> http(s):// | .mpd | .xml | .m3u8
Options:
--base-url <BASE_URL> Base url to be used for building absolute url to segment. This flag is usually needed for local input files. By default redirected
playlist url is used
-d, --directory <DIRECTORY> Change directory path for temporarily downloaded files. By default current working directory is used
-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
--parse Parse playlist and returns it in json format. Note that `--output` flag is ignored when this flag is used
--color <COLOR> When to output colored text [default: auto] [possible values: auto, always, never]
--raw-prompts Raw style input prompts for old and unsupported terminals
-h, --help Print help
Automation Options:
--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|HEIGHTp> Automatic selection of some standard resolution streams with highest bandwidth stream variant from playlist. If
matching resolution of WIDTHxHEIGHT is not found then only resolution HEIGHT would be considered for selection. comman
values: [lowest, min, 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, hd, 1080p, fhd, 2k, 1440p, qhd, 4k, 8k, highest, max] [default:
highest]
--skip-prompts Skip user input prompts and proceed with defaults
Client Options:
--cookies <COOKIES> Fill request client with some existing cookies value. Cookies value can be same as document.cookie or in json format same as
puppeteer
--header <KEY> <VALUE> Custom headers for requests. This option can be used multiple times
--no-certificate-checks Skip checking and validation of site certificates
--proxy <PROXY> Set http(s) / socks proxy address for requests
--set-cookie <SET_COOKIE> <URL> Fill request client with some existing cookies per domain. First value for this option is set-cookie header and second value is
url which was requested to send this set-cookie header. Example `--set-cookie "foo=bar; Domain=yolo.local" https://yolo.local`.
This option can be used multiple times
--user-agent <USER_AGENT> Update and set user agent header for requests [default: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,
like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"]
Decrypt Options:
--all-keys Use all supplied keys for decryption instead of using keys which matches with default kid only
-k, --key <KEY|KID:KEY> Keys for decrypting encrypted streams. If streams are encrypted with a single key then there is no need to specify key id else specify
decryption key in format KID:KEY. KEY value can be specified in hex, base64 or file format. This option can be used multiple times
--no-decrypt Download encrypted streams without decrypting them. Note that --output flag is ignored if this flag is used
Download Options:
--retry-count <RETRY_COUNT> Maximum number of retries to download an individual segment [default: 15]
--no-merge Download streams without merging them. Note that --output flag is ignored if this flag is used
-t, --threads <THREADS> Maximum number of threads for parllel downloading of segments. Number of threads should be in range 1-16 (inclusive) [default: 5]
List of alternatives to vsd:
- 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.
- N_m3u8DL-CLI is also good but it is not cross platform.
- m3u8-downloader is also good but it has very few customizable options.
- webvideo-downloader opens up the website using chrome and then captures m3u8 requests. vsd's capture command is closest to this functionality.
- dash-mpd-cli is very good for downloading DASH playlists. Also, most of the vsd internals for parsing and downloading DASH playlists is taken for it's main project.
Dual Licensed