How to download an m3u8 stream as one video file

Three steps

1. Open the video page and press play. As soon as the player requests data VGrab finds it; a number appears on the icon.
2. Click the extension icon. Everything downloadable on the page is listed, the most likely film first — ads, looping background clips and trailers are pushed down. A quality is already chosen: 480P by default, the closest level if 480P is missing, and the popup shows the level actually used; tap another to change.
3. Press Save. The extension does the rest: fetches every piece in the playlist, joins them in order, writes the file to your download folder and pops a notification.

Why "Save as" gets you nothing

Many sites don't store a film as one file. They cut it into pieces a few seconds long and write a playlist telling the player which piece comes next. The playlist usually ends in .m3u8 (HLS) or .mpd (DASH). Right-click in the page and you only touch the player shell; the hundreds of pieces beneath it are fetched one at a time as they play.

Sites do this so video can switch quality with your bandwidth and start from the middle. Good for the site; for anyone saving the video it adds three chores: get the playlist, fetch every piece, join them in order. VGrab folds all three into the one press of Save.

What you get

A normal .mp4. Only the container changes — no re-encoding — so it is fast and loses no quality, and you need no separate converter. In rare cases where the container can't be changed you get a .ts and the popup says why. Files land in the browser's download folder, in a sub-folder per site, named after the video title. Players on computers, phones and TVs open them and can seek.

Glossary, one line each

• M3U8: a text playlist listing which pieces a video was cut into, how long each is, and their order. Ends in .m3u8.
• HLS: the whole scheme of playing video from an M3U8 playlist; defined by Apple, used by most sites today.
• DASH: a sibling scheme with .mpd playlists, often sending video and audio as separate tracks.
• Segment (piece): the few-second files, usually .ts or .m4s. An hour-long video has hundreds to over a thousand.
• Master and media playlists: the master lists the quality levels; each level has a media playlist of its own segments. VGrab picks a level from the master, then fetches by that level's media playlist.
• DRM: rights protection set by the rights holder, such as Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady. VGrab does not download these and does nothing to bypass them; it tells you plainly.

Questions

DRM-protected video? It can't be saved. When VGrab meets Widevine, FairPlay or PlayReady it tells you so plainly and stops; see the glossary.

Video and audio as two tracks? Some sites, DASH especially, send them separately. When both are found the extension merges them into one file with sound; if only one is found it says so rather than silently giving you a silent file.

The site rate-limits? Ask too fast and a site starts refusing. The extension slows down to a single lane instead of retrying until your allowance is gone; only after ten minutes of no progress does it stop and tell you. Press Continue later and it resumes from that segment.

Connection dropped halfway? Finished segments stay on disk. Drop at 87 percent and Continue starts at 87, not zero.

A few segments never arrive? They are skipped, the rest continues, a second pass fills them in; anything still missing is reported as "N parts missing", never faked. Refreshing the page and detecting again usually yields a fresh playlist.

Just one part of it? Yes — Section download in the popup, set start and end, and only those segments come down, saved as an MP4 named with the time range.

Audio only? Audio only in the popup saves an m4a without the video track.