What plugins people want

Quote

Download the following Discovery.com show page:

dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/gold-rush/videos/the-long-road.htm

There will be some JSON which includes a list of clips. The '"m3u8": ' items are the interesting bits. These might be multiple short 1-2 minute clips, and there will be one much longer clip (~42 minutes). In the above case:

discidevflash-f.akamaihd.net/i/digmed/hdnet/35/f8/02652500201001_GR_Long_Road-,400k,110k,200k,600k,800k,1500k,3500k,.mp4.csmil/master.m3u8

is the one we're interested in. Downloading the referenced file, we get a text file with several lines like this:

....
#EXT-X-STREAM-INFROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=3560000,RESOLUTION=1280x720,CODECS="avc1.77.30, mp4a.40.5"
index_6_av.m3u8?e=b471643725c47acd
....

Concatenate the base of the above URL with the a requested playlist to get (in this case the HD stream):

discidevflash-f.akamaihd.net/i/digmed/hdnet/35/f8/02652500201001_GR_Long_Road-,400k,110k,200k,600k,800k,1500k,3500k,.mp4.csmil/index_6_av.m3u8?e=b471643725c47acd

Downloading this file, we finally get the playlist:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:10
#EXT-X-ALLOW-CACHE:YES
#EXT-X-VERSION:2
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:1
#EXTINF:10,
segment1_6_av.ts?e=b471643725c47acd
#EXTINF:10,
segment2_6_av.ts?e=b471643725c47acd
#EXTINF:10,
...
etc

In the case of the above HD stream, each segment will be about 4-5 megabytes and there could be upwards of 250 of them. These segments are parts of an mpeg transport stream, and seem to be safe to blindly concatenate. They are identified by ffmpeg as follows:

Input #0, mpegts, from 'ts/segment99_6_av.ts?e=b471643725c47acd':
Duration: 00:00:10.01, start: 980.113000, bitrate: 3623 kb/s
Program 1
Stream #0.0[0x100]: Video: h264 (Main), yuv420p, 1280x720 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 32.11 fps, 1k tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x101]: Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 63 kb/s