

This will open a new dialog where you can choose:

Now you can either play it in the VLC right away, or check the Stream Output checkbox and click Settings. What you need to do next is to choose File -> Open Network dialog and paste the URL of the m3u8 playlist from the prev. The title of this post says “… with no special software”, yet we will use the VLC player here which I deliberately categorize as a software that everyone can get on every platform, so its not a special software. If you see that for some reason you are downloading the low quality stream, extract the HQ stream URL and use it instead of the master playlist URL. The first cropped link is for the playlist with 720x294 resolution, whereas the second one is a HQ version with “1200x490” stream. Consider the following m3u8 file contents: In the master playlist body you can see the different versions of the playlists, typically they differ with the quality settings. Make sure to get the master playlist request url and copy it in your clipboard. Now the first part is easy, you go to the page where a vide player is rendered and search for the m3u8 file using the developers tools console of your browser.

Here I share with you an easy way to download the videos from an m3u/m3u8 playlist. But what do we do when the video is hosted somewhere in the CDN and is served as a dynamic playlist of *.ts files? If a talk is published on the YouTube, you are good to go and download it with any web service that pops up in the google search by the term “Youtube download”. Sometimes an easy registration is all it takes, but then, how do you watch it offline? For example, I do love to catch up with with the recent trends and experiences while being on a plane, meaning that I just cant afford to be hooked up to the Internet. Luckily the trend to share the knowledge with a community openly is growing, yet you still can find a nice talk hidden behind the above mentioned walls.

I love the tech conferences that share the recordings of the sessions without hiding behind the registration or a pay wall.
