HLS streaming downloads and related problems

A lot of website nowdays are using HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) streaming instead of progressive video streaming.

Very basic explanation: Such media items are files split up in thousands of segments.
These segments are downloaded and merged into one file on your disk.
In many cases the links to such streams contain the string ".m3u8".

To download them and save them to your disk JDownloader may utilize FFmpeg.

At the time of writing this article, the HLS download in JDownloader has the following known limitations:

• resume of interrupted HLS downloads is not possible
• multi chunk download is not possible for HLS downloads
• if segments of a HLS stream are missing, JDownloader will display an error message, it cannot just skip missing segments, see troubleshooting down below

Error "Segment XX not loaded"

This means that JDownloader was unable to download some of the segments of a HLS stream download.

Effectively this means that some parts of the (audio/video) stream are missing server-side.

Browsers and other download tools may ignore such errors and just skip these segments but JDownloader typically wants to download all segments of such items because anything else would potentially leave the user with an incomplete media file.

Other tools can simply ignore missing segments so you can try this method without JDownloader.

If you experience this problem frequently, you should contact our support.