Many online web videos on news websites are composed of multiple sections that are assembled by a playlist file. Websites such as the Herald Sun have videos like this. But downloading the videos is very easy. Using yt-dlp it is simple to download and assemble the video in one go.
Press F12 on the video page to open the web inspector. Then click the Network tab and select Media in the right-hand section. Then reload the page. All of the web video segments will be shown. Select the content.3u8 file and right-click on it. Select Copy Value and then Copy URL, paste this into the terminal and use this command to download the video.
(jcartwright@2403-4800-25af-b00--2) 192.168.1.5 Doom $ yt-dlp https://ssaimanifest.prod.boltdns.net/ap-southeast-2/playback/once/v1/hls/v4/clear/5348771529001/2cb8109a-39f2-4e4f-a4ce-ec3941116954/f4472364-0334-49f4-974c-516202a0c03d/b73eff10-87d2-454b-8af9-0fdc09da86e7/content.m3u8?bc_token=NjYxZTJhMzdfNWM0NWU2MTBjMzY1MjZhZGQ0MTU5ZGMyOTgxMTE1MWQ0YTA3Yzg3NWI0MTdhMjU5MDlkYzJmMDE2NDgyNTM1OA%3D%3D&rule=discos-enabled [1] 11800 (jcartwright@2403-4800-25af-b00--2) 192.168.1.5 Doom $ [generic] Extracting URL: https://ssaimanifest.prod.boltdns.net/ap-southeast-2/playback/once/v1/hls/v4/clear/5348771529001/...MDE2NDgyNTM1OA%3D%3D [generic] content: Downloading webpage [generic] content: Downloading m3u8 information [generic] content: Checking m3u8 live status [info] content: Downloading 1 format(s): 2341+audio-0-en__Main_ [hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest [hlsnative] Total fragments: 7 [download] Destination: content [content].f2341.mp4 [download] 100% of 15.83MiB in 00:00:04 at 3.47MiB/s [hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest [hlsnative] Total fragments: 7 [download] Destination: content [content].faudio-0-en__Main_.mp4 [download] 100% of 1.37MiB in 00:00:01 at 876.63KiB/s [Merger] Merging formats into "content [content].mp4" Deleting original file content [content].f2341.mp4 (pass -k to keep) Deleting original file content [content].faudio-0-en__Main_.mp4 (pass -k to keep) |
The yt-dlp utility will download all segments that comprise the video and then assemble the final video clip. This even works with premium videos, you may download them for free.
This really does work very well and is very useful to download a useful news video.