# 🛠️ How to Download Skool Videos Using yt-dlp and a Signed m3u8 URL


# 🛠️ How to Download Skool Videos Using `yt-dlp` and a Signed `.m3u8` URL

If you’ve ever tried downloading videos hosted on [Skool.com](https://www.skool.com), you’ve probably run into access errors or 403s. That’s because Skool streams video using tokenized `.m3u8` manifests over CDN infrastructure — specifically **Fastly** — with strict header and token checks.

This guide walks you through the **exact working method** to download those videos using [`yt-dlp`](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp), the modern replacement for `youtube-dl`.

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## ✅ Requirements

To follow along, you'll need:

- [`yt-dlp`](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) installed  
  (via `brew install yt-dlp` or `pip install -U yt-dlp`)
- A valid `.m3u8` link with a signature token (see below)
- Basic shell access (macOS, Linux, WSL, or terminal)

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## 🔍 Step 1: Find the `.m3u8` URL

1. Open the video on Skool in your browser.
2. Right-click and select **Inspect** to open Developer Tools.
3. Go to the **Network** tab.
4. Filter by `m3u8`.
5. Look for a request to `manifest-gcp-us-east1-vop1.fastly.video.skool.com/.../rendition.m3u8?...`
6. Right-click the `.m3u8` request → **Copy as cURL**.
7. Extract just the full `.m3u8` URL with the `?signature=...` token at the end.

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## 📥 Step 2: Download Using `yt-dlp`

Once you have the full `.m3u8` URL, run:

```bash
yt-dlp \
  --add-header "Referer: https://www.skool.com/" \
  --add-header "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
  --output "~/Desktop/skool-video.%(ext)s" \
  "https://manifest-gcp-us-east1-vop1.fastly.video.skool.com/.../rendition.m3u8?cdn=...&signature=..."

💡 Make sure to paste the full signed URL from DevTools. If the token is expired (expires=...), refresh the page and grab a new one.

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📄 What’s Happening Behind the Scenes?

Skool’s video URLs:
	•	Are CDN-hosted by Fastly
	•	Require a signed query string (signature=...)
	•	Enforce referer and user-agent headers
	•	Expire based on a Unix timestamp (expires=...)

yt-dlp can:
	•	Parse .m3u8 manifests
	•	Download all .ts segments
	•	Merge them automatically into .mp4

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🧪 Optional Bash Script

Save the following as skool-dl.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# Usage: ./skool-dl.sh <signed .m3u8 URL>

yt-dlp \
  --add-header "Referer: https://www.skool.com/" \
  --add-header "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
  --output "$HOME/Desktop/skool-video.%(ext)s" \
  "$1"

Make it executable:

chmod +x skool-dl.sh

Then run:

./skool-dl.sh "https://manifest-gcp-us-east1-...rendition.m3u8?...&signature=..."


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🛑 Common Errors

Error	Reason	Fix
403 Forbidden	Expired token	Refresh page and re-copy .m3u8
403 Forbidden	Missing headers	Ensure Referer and User-Agent are set
Unable to download webpage	Wrong URL	Only use signed Fastly .m3u8, not stream.video.skool.com


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📦 Example Output

[generic] Extracting URL...
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest...
[download] Merged format into skool-video.mp4

Your video should now be saved as ~/Desktop/skool-video.mp4.

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⚠️ Legal Disclaimer

This guide is provided for educational or archival purposes. Respect intellectual property rights and platform terms of service. Do not redistribute copyrighted content.


## Related

- [SERP Apps](https://apps.serp.co)
- [SERP Apps github](https://github.com/serpapps)
 - [Skool Downloader](https://apps.serp.co/skool-video-downloader)
 - [Skool Downloader Repo](https://github.com/serpapps/skool-downloader)