Downloading ooyala video's or how I viewed a m3u8 on my windows phone.

05Feb2015

Neil deGrasse Tyson posted a video on his blog today and I wanted to watch it on my mobile phone.

I could have just watched it because its very small but no, I realy wanted the video offline.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-nerd-hobby-2015-1?r=US

And lucky us, ooyala provides a link to embeded the video, in such a way, that we have a direct link to their playlist. or apparantly, a m3u8 is a kind of stream playlist.

Some google and bing minutes later and I got the following website:

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/359319-How-do-I-download-the-following-m3u8-url

basicly saying:

ffmpeg can download it with the following command line:

Code: ffmpeg -i inputvideo.m3u8 outputvideo.ts

So yes, after I downloaded ffmpeg (realy handy) I later got a ts file, thats basicly a mp2 file like settop boxes use for streams.

altho I could have tried converting the file, windows mediaplayer and VLC just play it.

and while I copied the file to my Windows Phone 8.1, he said "This device does not support playing this file, would you like to convert it?" I clicked yes and there was a WMV file, with audio and video on my mobile :D

Thanks for reading, the more you know :D