Setup & Installation
Or with the ClawHub CLI, for registry-managed skill folders outside a full OpenClaw workspace:
What This Skill Does
Downloads HLS/m3u8 video streams, including AES-128 encrypted ones, by fetching segments in parallel and merging them into a single MP4. Works with master playlists, non-standard segment extensions, and streams that require browser inspection to locate the URL.
Parallel segment downloading with aria2c is significantly faster than sequential tools, and built-in AES-128 decryption via ffmpeg handles encrypted streams that most download managers fail on.
When to use it
- Downloading a paywalled lecture video for offline viewing
- Saving a live event replay before it expires
- Grabbing a 1080p stream from a site with no download button
- Archiving encrypted HLS content from a private portal
- Extracting the highest-quality variant from a multi-bitrate stream
Example Workflow
Here's how your AI assistant might use this skill in practice.
User asks: download the video at https://example.com/watch?id=123
- 1Open the page in an isolated browser and run console JS to extract the m3u8 URL from the HLS.js player instance
- 2Fetch the master playlist with curl and identify the highest-bandwidth variant
- 3Download all segments to /tmp/video_download using aria2c with 16 parallel connections
- 4Generate a filelist.txt and merge segments into a single MP4 with ffmpeg -c copy
- 5Move the file to ~/Downloads and clean up the temp directory
~/Downloads/output.mp4 containing the full video, no re-encoding
Requirements
Accounts, API keys, or tools you or your AI assistant may need to set up while using this skill.