this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Best tool for a casual user to remux and download videos? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by plankton@programming.dev to c/opensource@programming.dev
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TLDR: what tool will let a casual user to input a URL (to a disguised .m3u8 file) and get a .mp4?

Backstory, our school uses Panopto to record lectures. The web interface is crap, but I found a project that lets you download the video files as .mp4

https://programming.dev/post/21072323

that is until 2 weeks ago when Panopto started exporting the files as

  • 1 large .panobf1 file
  • 2 small .panobf2 files, a few bytes each

I can swap the file extension for the .panobf1 file to .mp4. This is enough 90% of the time. However, since this is the file with the classroom camera overlaid on the slides, it blocks the content in the corner.

Investigating the .panobf2 files:

❯ file master.panobf2
master.panobf2: M3U playlist, ASCII text

I ran this command on each .panobf2 file to download the classroom stream and slides stream as separate mp4 files.

ffmpeg -i <file-url> -c copy video.mp4

It's finals season and I want to make a new post to help people out. CLI isn't for everyone, so I'm looking for a tool instead

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[–] Lemmchen@feddit.org 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

yt-dlp can download m3u8 playlists AFAIK

[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I was going to suggest this but I couldn't say it's "casual user" friendly. That said, there is no better utility.

[–] michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There are many GUIs for yt-dlp.

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Stacher is what I use. Makes things very easy.

[–] michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 3 months ago

I use Parabolic on Linux and YTDLnis on Android. I chose them because of the consistency of design with the OS.

[–] plankton@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It looks nice, but is it still open source?

https://github.com/bradleyasu/ytdl50

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago

That is a fair question. I honestly have no idea.

[–] Lemmchen@feddit.org 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I missed that in the OP.

[–] plankton@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

That's alright, it started the discussion and I learned about the GUIs

[–] plankton@programming.dev 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

~~VLC might work, testing now~~

~~It's slow to get started compared to ffmpeg~~

Convert and save grabbed the audio only, need to play with it more

[–] Flyswat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not strictly user-friendly but this how I usually do it with this ONE command:

ffmpeg -allowed_extensions ALL -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls,crypto -i PLAYLIST.m3u -codec copy OUTPUT.mp4
[–] stembolts@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

CLI is the way.

Don't rely on a black box, build a transparent box.

[–] sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Have you checked JDownloader. I think it may work. Haven't tested though.

[–] plankton@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

It looks old, but I will try it and report back