TLDR: what tool will let a casual user to input a URL (to a disguised .m3u8 file) and get a .mp4?

Backstory, our school uses Panopto to record lectures. The web interface is crap, but I found a project that lets you download the video files as .mp4

https://programming.dev/post/21072323

that is until 2 weeks ago when Panopto started exporting the files as

  • 1 large .panobf1 file
  • 2 small .panobf2 files, a few bytes each

I can swap the file extension for the .panobf1 file to .mp4. This is enough 90% of the time. However, since this is the file with the classroom camera overlaid on the slides, it blocks the content in the corner.

Investigating the .panobf2 files:

❯ file master.panobf2
master.panobf2: M3U playlist, ASCII text

I ran this command on each .panobf2 file to download the classroom stream and slides stream as separate mp4 files.

ffmpeg -i <file-url> -c copy video.mp4

It’s finals season and I want to make a new post to help people out. CLI isn’t for everyone, so I’m looking for a tool instead