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 then copy vsd binary to any path. Now add that path to your PATH environment variable.
Collecting .m3u8 (HLS), .mpd (Dash) and subtitles from a website and saving them locally.
bash
$ vsd capture <url> --save
Help
bash
$ vsd --help
```
Download video streams served over HTTP from websites, DASH (.mpd) and HLS (.m3u8) playlists.
Usage: vsd [OPTIONS]
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 When to output colored text [default: auto] [possible values: auto, always, never]
-h, --help Print help
-V, --version Print version
```
bash
$ vsd save --help
```
Download DASH and HLS playlists
Usage: vsd save [OPTIONS]
Arguments:
http(s):// | .mpd | .xml | .m3u8
Options:
--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 Change directory path for temporarily downloaded files. By default current working directory is used
-o, --output
Automation Options:
--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 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 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 Fill request client with some existing cookies value. Cookies value can be same as document.cookie or in json format same as
puppeteer
--header Custom headers for requests. This option can be used multiple times
--no-certificate-checks Skip checking and validation of site certificates
--proxy Set http(s) / socks proxy address for requests
--set-cookie 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 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 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 Maximum number of retries to download an individual segment [default: 15]
-t, --threads Maximum number of threads for parllel downloading of segments. Number of threads should be in range 1-16 (inclusive) [default: 5]
```
Alternatives
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.
