hlsdump is a simple command line tool that allows dumping HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) streams (live or VOD) as-is with no transformations like transcoding or repacking to another video/audio container format. This can be used to fully dump a HLS stream for later investigation.
Note: hlsdump does not know anything about particular video/audio containers or codecs, it just understands the HLS playlist format and downloads all segments it can find.
hlsdump is written in Go and can be built using go build. Then, simply run ./hlsdump (or hlsdump.exe on Windows).
Check ./hlsdump -help to see all available command line options.
Apple (the original developer of HLS) provides some example streams at: https://developer.apple.com/streaming/examples/
To dump the "basic stream"
using hlsdump, you would use ./hlsdump https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/streaming/examples/bipbop_16x9/bipbop_16x9_variant.m3u8.
Note that this will create many many small files in the current directory since each segment is stored in a separate file.
To avoid that, the one and only transformation that hlsdump supports is to use the EXT-X-BYTERANGE feature
to store all segments in a single file. You can enable that using the -single-file parameter.
hlsdump will then download the master playlist and all available streams (different video resolutions, audio qualities, ...).
The downloaded stream playlists .m3u8 next to a audio/video file can be typically also played with players like VLC or mpv,
or further transformed using ffmpeg.
Note: The master playlist is also dumped to the current directory, but currently it is not transformed to point to the downloaded stream playlists. It can be easily edited with a text editor to point there, though.