Download Amazon Product Videos with Python: A Complete m3u8 Scraping Guide

1. Introduction

A user in a Python community asked how to scrape Amazon product videos. This article shares a solution using Python to download the m3u8 video streams.

2. Solution Process

The video is delivered in m3u8 format, a variant of Apple’s HLS streaming protocol encoded in UTF‑8. By extracting the .ts segment URLs from the m3u8 file, each segment can be downloaded and later merged into a single MP4 file.

The following code (adapted from a GitHub tutorial) demonstrates the complete workflow:

import datetime
import time
import os
import requests

# m3u8 is a local file path
def get_ts_urls(m3u8_path):
    urls = []
    with open(m3u8_path, "r") as file:
        lines = file.readlines()
        for line in lines:
            if line.endswith(".ts
"):
                print(line)
                urls.append("https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/vse-vms-transcoding-artifact-us-east-1-prod/084028a2-9a64-485f-a55b-676577059927/" + line.strip("
"))
    return urls

def download(ts_urls, download_path):
    for i in range(len(ts_urls)):
        ts_url = ts_urls[i]
        file_name = ts_url.split("/")[-1]
        print("开始下载 %s" % file_name)
        try:
            response = requests.get(ts_url, stream=True, verify=False)
        except Exception as e:
            print("异常请求：%s" % e.args)
            return
        ts_path = download_path + "/{0}.ts".format(i)
        with open(ts_path, "wb+") as file:
            for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
                if chunk:
                    file.write(chunk)
        time.sleep(.56)

def file_walker(path):
    file_list = os.listdir(path)
    file_list.sort(key=lambda x: int(x[:-3]))
    file_list_ = []
    for fn in file_list:
        p = str("tsfiles" + '/' + fn)
        file_list_.append(p)
    print(file_list_)
    return file_list_

def combine(ts_path, file_name):
    file_list = file_walker(ts_path)
    file_path = file_name + '.MP4'
    with open(file_path, 'wb+') as fw:
        for i in range(len(file_list)):
            fw.write(open(file_list[i], 'rb').read())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    urls = get_ts_urls("./data.txt")
    download(urls, "tsfiles")
    combine("tsfiles", "大理")

The script downloads each .ts segment, saves them locally, and then merges them using the combine() function to produce a final .mp4 file.

Alternatively, the ffmpeg tool can be used with a single command:

ffmpeg -allowed_extensions ALL -i <m3u8_url> -c copy output.mp4

3. Conclusion

The guide provides a practical method for downloading m3u8 videos with Python, offering both a custom script and a quick ffmpeg shortcut for efficient video extraction.