Jerome Paulos

How to download lecture videos from Panopto

  1. Install ffmpeg for your operating system.
  2. Open Panopto and log in.
  3. Open your browser’s developer tools and go to the network tab.
  4. Click on the lecture you want to download in Panopto.
  5. Look for request to master.m3u8 in the developer tools and copy the URL. It should look something like this: https://something.cloudfront.net/sessions/something/something.hls/master.m3u8. Remove anything after master.m3u8.
  6. Open a terminal and run ffmpeg -i "<URL>" -c copy output.ts.1 If you’re not using macOS, either write output.mp4,2 or download VLC.
  7. Play the video with QuickTime Player or VLC.

Footnotes

  1. This will save the file to the directory your terminal is open to. You may want to switch to, for example, your downloads folder (cd ~/Downloads). ↩

  2. This will convert the .ts file (MPEG-4 transport stream) into a more commonly-supported .mp4 file. However, it will take longer and might be worth instead installing a program that can open .ts video files. ↩