A small script to make recording http live streams (HLS, those streams that work on iOS devices) nicer on a Mac. Script records the stream for a defined period of time and sends the user notifications if anything goes wrong and once it's done.

HLS_dvr.sh

# required: ffmpeg (e.g. from homebrew), terminal-notifier from https://github.com/alloy/terminal-notifier 
# you can schedule this with launchd to run e.g. weekly

# Specify in seconds how long the script should record (default here is 1 hour).
seconds=3600

# Date format for the recording file name
DATE=`date "+%d-%m-%y_%H-%M"`

# start ffmpeg recording
ffmpeg -re -i http://website.com/playlist.m3u8 -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc recording_$DATE.mp4 &

# notification that recording has started
if [ "$(pgrep -P $$ 'ffmpeg')" ]
then
	/Applications/terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -title 'ffmpeg' -message "is recording now" -sender 'com.apple.Terminal'
else
	/Applications/terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -title 'ffmpeg' -message "is not recording!" -sound Funk -sender 'com.apple.Terminal'
	exit 42
fi

# check every 30 seconds for $seconds to make sure ffmpeg is still running
START=`date +%s`
while [ $(( $(date +%s) - $seconds )) -lt $START ]; do
	if [ -z "$(pgrep -P $$ 'ffmpeg')" ]
    	then
       		/Applications/terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -title 'ffmpeg' -message "is no longer running" -sound Funk -sender 'com.apple.Terminal'
  	fi
	sleep 30
done

# notification when time is up
/Applications/terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -title 'ffmpeg' -message "recording finished" -sound default -sender 'com.apple.Terminal'

# stop ffmpeg (using this because stopping ffmpeg via -t for duration turned out to be extremely unreliable)
kill $(pgrep -P $$ 'ffmpeg')

Thanks a lot! Saved me a bunch of time :)

This is great! Thanks.

Thanks for the idea!
Instead of "kill" you could use ffmpeg's -t for time limits.

using ffmpeg -re real time option will eventually results in packet loss here. That option is mainly for outputing live streams not recording them. With that enabled ffmpeg ends up recording just a bit slower than 1x and eventually it think it's farther behind in the stream then the packets the streaming serving still has in its buffer. The docs touch on this

@moloku see the comment on the use of kill :-)

# stop ffmpeg (using this because stopping ffmpeg via -t for duration turned out to be extremely unreliable)

a better option to use is -timelimit limits the amount of time ffmpeg has been running ( not the time in the stream)