Download Hls Streaming Video

These modern days are filled with instant entertainment where we watch movies endlessly on the go. The development in technology is urging to discover new upgrades in the streaming trend.

How To Download Hls Streaming Video
Downloading Hls Streaming Files
Hls Streaming How To Download
Download Hls Streaming Video Firefox
Download Hls Streaming Video Firefox

HLS Downloader is a lite and multi-browser addon that lets you easily download fragmented media files from the internet. HLS or HTTP Live Stram is a new media format developed by Apple. It contains a master playlist with.m3u8 file extension. HLS Downloader lets you easily download fragmented media files (with.ts file extension) from the internet. HLS or HTTP Live steam is a new media format developed by Apple Inc. It contains a master playlist with '.m3u8' file extension. First, the extension downloads the master playlist, and then within the master, it finds playlist content.

As we all are aware of a video streaming website or application that stream videos without any issue such as a buffer-free video streaming demands high-grade technology.

A live streaming app or website require pretty good technology that backups the entire streaming platform. Thus, HTTP Live streaming protocol is the top-rated streaming protocol that has been used in major Live streaming and OTT platforms such as Netflix, Hotstar, and Amazon Prime.

So, here comes the live video streaming solution for the broadcasters, online tutors, enterprises and others to stream video content across the globe without any buffering. And now you have come to a conclusion that what technology performs behind buffer-free video streaming on websites.

Let us dig deeper into the HTTP live streaming (HLS) protocol to have a clear and insightful understanding of it.

What is HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) Protocol?

HTTP Live streaming (also known as HLS) protocol is an adaptive bitrate streaming communication protocol which was first implemented by Apple Inc. The video format which is obtained from HLS is m3u8.

Advantages of Hls Live Streaming

HLS offers adaptive streaming technology which is the best protocol for watching a video without buffering.
This provides streaming of content as on-demand (VoD) and also stream the content in live.
Prevent unauthorized access and privacy of the video can be optimized by DRM solutions.
Addition of multiple audio and subtitles in single video content is also possible.
Insightful analytics can also be added to examine the growth of video content.
To reap profits from every view, Monetization features help to excel in your video streaming business.

The Working of Hls Protocol

At foremost, a video is been uploaded to a server which is of any format such as mkv, mp4, .mov, 3GP and much more. The entire video is been transcoded to m3u8 and stored in several cloud infrastructure such as AWS, Azure & so on.

The uploaded video will be converted into chunks based on the bit-rate which is demanded by the users. The video content will be transcoded into the respective format which is been assigned by the user.

Further, the HLS URL contains a set of URL based on bitrate called a Playlist. At initial, one of the URL from the playlist is been loaded and played a fraction of seconds which contains a set of break down streams so-called .ts file.

The client is then responsible for requesting the appropriate playlist depending on the available bandwidth. It works by breaking down streams or video assets into several small MPEG2-TS files (video chunks) of varying bit rates and set duration using a stream or file segmenter. One such segmenter implementation is provided by Apple.

The segmenter is also responsible for producing a set of index files in the M3U8 format which acts as a playlist file for the video chunks. Each playlist pertains to a given bitrate level and contains the relative or absolute URLs to the chunks with the relevant bitrate.

What is HLS Adaptive Streaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming is a technique for dynamically optimizing the compression level and content quality by delivering the best quality of video to any specific user. The ABS matches to the bandwidth available at the user’s end in order to deliver the quality the user demands.

Reason to Choose Hls Adaptive Streaming

Network issue is very commendable.
Screen issue is not seen.
Buffer-free streaming of video content.
Diverse supported platforms.

Logics of Hls Adaptive Streaming

On considering the master playlist that contains http://vplayed.com/video/1232.m3u8 file. The master file is mapped with a playlist file which represents like below section.

When there occurs network change, this will lead to slow down the network. Once the issue is detected, the playlist is changed based on network speed automatically according to the bandwidth. This, in fact, results in playing the video in a buffer-free mode and changes been made in the quality of the video as per the users wish.

Conclusion

Adaptive bitrate streaming is being the single most important factor in delivering the optimum quality to the viewers. However, the entire technologies are not created in a way which is equal but the HLS protocol fits into all the online video players to offer buffer-free streaming to the devices you need.

In this post I’m going to show you how to use Nginx’s RTMP module to stream a live video (over RTMP) from your desktop and then play it back with HLS. I’ll also cover how to encrypt the video.

RTMP was initially a proprietary protocol by Adobe for streaming video and audio between a Flash player and a server but is still widely used today for broadcasting video despite the demise of Flash.

Note: I’m working on a live streaming solution that runs in your own cloud. Right now, only AWS is supported. A hosted option will also be available. Features will include, among other things, low-latency HLS and encryption. If you’re interested, send me a message, and I’ll let you know when it’s released.

How To Download Hls Streaming Video

Installation

I built the RTMP module on Ubuntu 18.04 but the installation instructions should work for any Debian-based Linux distribution.

The first thing to do is install Nginx if you haven’t already. You can install it from your distribution’s default package repositories but the provided version is usually outdated. A better option is to install it from the official Nginx repository. The current stable version is 1.18.

To install Nginx, run the following command: $ sudo apt install nginx

To build the RTMP module, first install the required dependencies then check out the source code of the module. We also need the source code of the version of Nginx that is installed. To build the module, run the following commands:

Downloading Hls Streaming Files

$ sudo apt install build-essential dpkg-dev libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libssl-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev $ git clone https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module.git $ apt-get source nginx $ cd nginx-1.18.0/ $ ./configure --with-compat --add-dynamic-module=../nginx-rtmp-module $ make modules $ sudo cp objs/ngx_rtmp_module.so /etc/nginx/modules/

This will build the RTMP module as a dynamic module. To load the module at runtime, add the following line to the Nginx configuration file (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf):

Now that Nginx has been installed and the RTMP module has been built, we need to configure it.

Configuring RTMP

The first thing we need to do is define an RTMP section in the Nginx configuration file:

The server will listen for connections on port 1935. Within the server block, we define an application called live. (You can call it whatever you like, I just happened to called it live.) We’ll refer back to this later on when we start streaming. To enable HLS, set hls to on. The next two parameters determine the location where the playlist and the segments will be written and the segment duration. In this instance, the playlist and segments are written to the /srv/www directory and the segment duration is set to 6 seconds.

To enable encryption (optional) set hls_keys to on. The next two values specify the directory where the keys will be written, and the base URL of the keys. Finally, we specify the key rotation period. This determines how many segments are encrypted with a key before a new key is generated. For example, if hls_fragments_per_key is set to 10 and the segment duration is 6 seconds, the encryption key will be rotated every minute.

The next step is to configure Nginx to serve the HLS playlist and segments. We do that by defining an http block in the configuration file:

The root location is set to /srv/www, which you’ll recall is the same location where the playlist and segments are written to. The expires parameter (line 48) specifies how long the playlist and the segments can be cached for, which is determined by looking up the value from a map based on the content type (line 38). In this case, the expiry time of the playlist (application/vnd.apple.mpegurl) is set to some time in the past (epoch) so it won’t be cached. Segments can be cached for 24 hours.

Note: Everything is served over HTTP. If you are encrypting the video then you should serve the keys over HTTPS. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

To start Nginx, run the following: $ sudo nginx

The next step is to prepare the live stream.

Preparing the Live Stream

Hls Streaming How To Download

If you want to stream the output of a webcam, I suggest downloading and installing OBS Studio. Alternatively, you can use ffmpeg to “live” stream a video.

However you decide to set-up your live stream, the format of the RTMP URL is the same. It must be in the following format: rtmp://<host>/<application name>/<stream key>

The host is either the IP address or the name of the server. As we are running it locally, it will be localhost.The application name must match the name in the Nginx configuration file, which in this example is live. The stream key can be anything – we’ll use test – and is used by the RTMP module to name the playlist and the segments. For example, if the stream key is test the playlist will be called test.m3u8 and the segments will be test-0.ts, test-1.ts, test-2.ts, and so on.