Supported tags
Encryption keys
The segments may be or not encrypted. The keys attribute list will
be a list with all the different keys as described with #EXT-X-KEY:
Each key has the next properties:
If no #EXT-X-KEY is found, the keys list will have a unique element None. Multiple keys are supported.
If unencrypted and encrypted segments are mixed in the M3U8 file, then the list will contain a None element, with one
or more keys afterwards.
To traverse the list of keys available:
import m3u8
m3u8_obj = m3u8.loads('#EXTM3U8 ... etc ...')
len(m3u8_obj.keys) => returns the number of keys available in the list (normally 1)
for key in m3u8_obj.keys:
if key: # First one could be None
key.uri
key.method
key.iv
Getting segments encrypted with one key
There are cases where listing segments for a given key is important. It’s possible to
retrieve the list of segments encrypted with one key via by_key method in the
segments list.
Example of getting the segments with no encryption:
import m3u8
m3u8_obj = m3u8.loads('#EXTM3U8 ... etc ...')
segmk1 = m3u8_obj.segments.by_key(None)
# Get the list of segments encrypted using last key
segm = m3u8_obj.segments.by_key( m3u8_obj.keys[-1] )
With this method, is now possible also to change the key from some of the segments programmatically:
import m3u8
m3u8_obj = m3u8.loads('#EXTM3U8 ... etc ...')
# Create a new Key and replace it
new_key = m3u8.Key("AES-128", "/encrypted/newkey.bin", None, iv="0xf123ad23f22e441098aa87ee")
for segment in m3u8_obj.segments.by_key( m3u8_obj.keys[-1] ):
segment.key = new_key
# Remember to sync the key from the list as well
m3u8_obj.keys[-1] = new_key
Variant playlists (variable bitrates)
A playlist can have a list to other playlist files, this is used to
represent multiple bitrates videos, and it’s called variant streams.
See an example here.
variant_m3u8 = m3u8.loads('#EXTM3U8 ... contains a variant stream ...')
variant_m3u8.is_variant # in this case will be True
for playlist in variant_m3u8.playlists:
playlist.uri
playlist.stream_info.bandwidth
the playlist object used in the for loop above has a few attributes:
uri: the url to the stream
stream_info: a StreamInfo object (actually a namedtuple) with
all the attributes available to #EXT-X-STREAM-INF
media: a list of related Media objects with all the attributes
available to #EXT-X-MEDIA
playlist_type: the type of the playlist, which can be one of VOD
(video on demand) or EVENT
NOTE: the following attributes are not implemented yet, follow
issue 4 for updates
alternative_audios: its an empty list, unless it’s a playlist
with Alternative audio, in this case it’s a list with Media
objects with all the attributes available to #EXT-X-MEDIA
alternative_videos: same as alternative_audios
A variant playlist can also have links to I-frame playlists, which are used
to specify where the I-frames are in a video. See Apple’s documentation on
this for more information. These I-frame playlists can be accessed in a similar
way to regular playlists.
variant_m3u8 = m3u8.loads('#EXTM3U ... contains a variant stream ...')
for iframe_playlist in variant_m3u8.iframe_playlists:
iframe_playlist.uri
iframe_playlist.iframe_stream_info.bandwidth
The iframe_playlist object used in the for loop above has a few attributes:
uri: the url to the I-frame playlist
base_uri: the base uri of the variant playlist (if given)
iframe_stream_info: a StreamInfo object (same as a regular playlist)
Using different HTTP clients
If you don’t want to use urllib to download playlists, having more control on how objects are fetched over the internet,
you can use your own client. requests is a well known Python HTTP library and it can be used with m3u8:
import m3u8
import requests
class RequestsClient():
def download(self, uri, timeout=None, headers={}, verify_ssl=True):
o = requests.get(uri, timeout=timeout, headers=headers)
return o.text, o.url
playlist = m3u8.load('http://videoserver.com/playlist.m3u8', http_client=RequestsClient())
print(playlist.dumps())
The advantage of using a custom HTTP client is to refine SSL verification, proxies, performance, flexibility, etc.
Playlists behind proxies
In case you need to use a proxy but can’t use a system wide proxy (HTTP/HTTPS proxy environment variables), you can pass your
HTTP/HTTPS proxies as a dict to the load function.
import m3u8
proxies = {
'http': 'http://10.10.1.10:3128',
'https': 'http://10.10.1.10:1080',
}
http_client = m3u8.httpclient.DefaultHTTPClient(proxies)
playlist = m3u8.load('http://videoserver.com/playlist.m3u8', http_client=http_client) # this could also be an absolute filename
print(playlist.dumps())
It works with the default client only. Custom HTTP clients must implement this feature.
Contributing
All contribution is welcome, but we will merge a pull request if, and only if, it
If you plan to implement a new feature or something that will take more
than a few minutes, please open an issue to make sure we don’t work on
the same thing.