Download m3u8 playlist with ffmpeg - step by step download script (ffmpeg binary required)

m3u8streamffmpegdl.sh

#!/bin/sh

# Author : Wang Poh Peng
# Description : Use FFMPEG to download videos into mkv or mp4 format

RED='\033[1;31m'
NC='\033[0m' # No Color
GREEN='\033[0;32m'
CYAN='\033[0;36m'

command -v ffmpeg >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo >&2 "${RED}ffmpeg is required for the script to download video stream. Run \`brew install ffmpeg\` if you are on Homebrew"; exit 1; }

echo "${GREEN}Enter m3u8 file url endpoint:${NC}"
read ENDPOINT
echo "${GREEN}Enter video file name to be saved as including extension eg. video1.mp4${NC}"
read FILENAME

ffmpeg -user_agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/601.7.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.1.3 Safari/537.86.7" -i $ENDPOINT -c copy $FILENAME

echo "${CYAN}The video file is saved at $PWD/$FILENAME"
echo "${NC} Resetting Terminal Font Color..."

Didn't work for me but the cause was that I was targeting the wrong m3u8 file. I looked into it (it's a text file) and found the correct ts files and downloaded them. It's frustrating because sometimes audio is on a separate playlist so you have to do the same for that.
I then assembled with ffmpeg -i HLS_AUDIO_160_K.ts -i HLS_540.ts -c:v copy -shortest OUT.mp4
or ffmpeg -i HLS_AUDIO.ts -i HLS_VIDEO.ts -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -shortest OUT.mp4 for extra compatibility with common messaging apps.

Oh! Thanks for the feedback! I was just using this to download videos from streaming sites mostly, but you are right I did encounter some issues where the audio was on a separate playlist! (btw, how did you stumble upon my gist?)

@thepoppingone me directly from google. Thanks! :)