.m3u8 file is a playlist format used by HLS (HTTP Live Streaming).

Instead of being a single video file, it contains URLs to many small video segments (.ts files).

Your browser or media player downloads them on the fly and plays them in order.

In other words:

- .mp4 → one solid file

- .m3u8 → a list of mini-files streamed in sequence

What We’re Doing

We’re intercepting the video player’s master playlist URL (the .m3u8 file) and downloading all its segments into a single .mp4 file.

Find the .m3u8 URL

1. Open the video page in Chrome (e.g., Skool classroom video).

2. Open Developer Tools → Network tab (Cmd+Opt+I on Mac / Ctrl+Shift+I on Windows).

3. Filter for m3u8.

4. Click Play on the video.

5. Look for the top request from stream.video.skool.com (this is the master playlist).

6. Right-click → Copy → Copy as cURL.

Download with ffmpeg

1. Install ffmpeg (Mac: brew install ffmpeg).

2. Convert the cURL headers into an ffmpeg command:

Get this command ready

ffmpeg -headers "Referer: https://skool.com/" \
      -i "" \
      -c copy output.mp4

Example of a 'copy as cURL' that you will be copy & pasting

curl 'https://stream.video.skool.com/ttoH002mbFAgKR1Eeod4Iq402jP9CWuW8uiVeEvn6D1qE.m3u8?token=eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJhdWQiOiJ2IiwiZXhwIjoxNzU0ODU2MDk5LCJraWQiOiJPVjIwMHZ6SWZuZFVCNHdXdTAxbDRjb0hrYTVQQUd3TlYwMEtZSkJrQkppVlFrIiwicGxheWJhY2tfcmVzdHJpY3Rpb25faWQiOiIzMDJ2dXNuVG1lbW1QSzllOUpMaWxaUmpnVkJ3T2hTNlVLdGkyWnhJS2V1WSIsInN1YiI6InR0b0gwMDJtYkZBZ0tSMUVlb2Q0SXE0MDJqUDlDV3VXOHVpVmVFdm42RDFxRSJ9.DEM65MQoPZpRbrZGzFGMCFA_Pwwsl1eMdLC9NqdV_QNHfIAbXkDPXs0Kv1X1G4ohp2Fh0Q7mpmtJL786NJx8moKDyCr5rXOpwViDWwGOhveLQ0m654xqaukkG1hY4Q_z0Dg4re-jk2ReLzxpoJTKVuXD01lW3xxp8El1hLfdkidUqGT3KLJ7R2QS6egU-FJy9SrFcHYLdW3ddQ4HX0XqeXrUMHzQhCBL7x39bSiBPbXEp_77l21KW3vCVocpm5uMc4iP8UFQNm5QTTtXzMB_OucJhDCRrjhBmmj-f-DDWC9iLC6Z57Xkx3kS2iuT3zoVc_MHlvyLuSs6z9nJv95PtQ&CMCD=cid%3D%22ttoH002mbFAgKR1Eeod4Iq402jP9CWuW8uiVeEvn6D1qE%22%2Csid%3D%22bca9b88c-162e-405d-bc93-2c51906943e0%22' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9' \
  -H 'origin: https://www.skool.com' \
  -H 'priority: u=1, i' \
  -H 'referer: https://www.skool.com/' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Not(A:Brand";v="99", "Google Chrome";v="133", "Chromium";v="133"' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "macOS"' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-site' \
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'