If I look back at the video I am trying to get, the manifest request can be extracted from the browser’s Network inspector, and ends up being the following: Again, a very calculated and smart thing, because the manifest contains different streaming preferences depending on the device, bandwidth, and allows packaging information about supported audio tracks.

Let’s dig more! When Azure Media Services first starts playing the video, it downloads a manifest that contains all the necessary information for streaming. This is all fine and dandy, but I still need to cut a part of the whole video for my project. The fragments are still MP4 chunks, but they can’t be played standalone if you copy and paste the URL - they need to be assembled together. But wait, what am I getting instead?Ī bunch of fragments! Azure Media Services, the underlying service that underpins the player hosted on a page, is not giving the full URL, but rather doing the smart thing and pre-buffering only the necessary parts (that is, within immediate play reach). So what do I do, fire up the web browser inspector and hit play, in the hopes to get a request captured. But I needed it that very moment (thank you, instant gratification). Now, ordinarily, and because I work on the team that produced those pages to begin with, I could reach out and ask where the source MP4 is located and get it that way.

The video in question is Into Focus, the “show within a show,” that aired at Microsoft’s Ignite conference earlier this week. I encountered a very unique challenge today - I needed to cut a part of a video hosted online with Azure Media Services for reference.

And you don't need write custom scripts for that. Downloading Azure Media Services Videos With FFMPEG Downloading streaming video is possible with free and open-source tools.

Ffmpeg download url