We will be working with the HLS test stream below: First of which is that it is open source, and second is it can perform any and every streaming operation you may want to execute. I find this tool really interesting for two reasons. M3u8 index file based on screen size and available bandwidth.įFMpeg is a multimedia framework with the ability to encode, decode, transcode, stream, and manipulate multimedia files. The streams are mapped to the client in real time using an. This means, when video is encoded to HLS, multiple files are created for different bandwidths and different resolutions (Screen sizes). HLS streaming is an adaptive bitrate technology. They are in turn packaged via RTMP protocol and sent to a media server which in turn un-packs the RTMP stream and re-packages it as HLS playlist to be sent to a CDN, cached for faster distribution to Players anywhere. ts files typically contains H.264 encoded video and AAC encoded audio, both compressed by an encoder. HLS was developed by Apple and it stands for “HTTP Live Streaming” which is the most widely used streaming protocol for playback today. I have had several experiences working with HLS streams and FFMpeg, and so in this article, I will be sharing how I was able to download and combine chunks of media segments of a variant of an HLS stream.

NB: This article aims to introduce the concept of HLS streaming and FFMpeg at a foundational level.

Ffmpeg download segments