How to download and encode a video from a MPD manifest? I can watch videos on a website with MPEG-DASH technology.

I can obtain the video's manifest.mpd file from the website. (I am not sure whether the file contains any user credentials or not, so I am not going to post it)

The video contains 3 tracks (1 video track + 2 audio tracks), and I found 3 &lt;AdaptationSet/&gt; elements with attribute mimeType in manifest.mpd.

They both contain a &lt;SegmentTemplate/&gt; element which has an attribute media containing the segment filename template which is being used to download the segment files in the browser from time to time.

The values to be used to construct the segment file URL are inside SegmentTemplate.SegmentTimeline.S elements.

For example :

...
&lt;AdaptationSet mimeType="video/mp4" ...other attributes&gt;
  &lt;SegmentTemplate
    presentationTimeOffset="0"
    timescale="90000"
    media="chunk_video_$RepresentationID$_cs$Time$_mpd.m4s"
    initialization="chunk_video_$RepresentationID$_cinit_mpd.m4s"
  &gt;
    &lt;SegmentTimeline&gt;
      &lt;S t="0" d="900000"/&gt;
      &lt;S d="900000" r="352"/&gt;
      &lt;S d="638370"/&gt;
    &lt;/SegmentTimeline&gt;
  &lt;/SegmentTemplate&gt;
  &lt;Representation id="SOME-ID" codecs="avc1.640029" sar="1:1" bandwidth="1268094"/&gt;
&lt;AdaptationSet/&gt;
&lt;AdaptationSet mimeType="audio/mp4" ...other attributes&gt;
...


will produce requests to

https://some-website-domain/some-path/chunk_video_SOME-ID_cinit_mpd.m4s
https://some-website-domain/some-path/chunk_video_SOME-ID_cs0_mpd.m4s
https://some-website-domain/some-path/chunk_video_SOME-ID_cs900000_mpd.m4s
https://some-website-domain/some-path/chunk_video_SOME-ID_cs1800000_mpd.m4s
https://some-website-domain/some-path/chunk_video_SOME-ID_cs2700000_mpd.m4s
...


some-website-domain/some-path is not sure at this moment, but I could figure this out.

The real question is:

Is it possible to download and encode all the segment files into one single video file?

---- EDIT ----

After running the following command:

ffmpeg -v 48 -i manifest.mpd -c copy out.mp4


I got this output:

Splitting the commandline.
Reading option '-v' ... matched as option 'v' (set logging level) with argument '48'.
Reading option '-i' ... matched as input url with argument 'manifest.mpd'.
Reading option '-c' ... matched as option 'c' (codec name) with argument 'copy'.
Reading option 'out.mp4' ... matched as output url.
Finished splitting the commandline.
Parsing a group of options: global .
Applying option v (set logging level) with argument 48.
Successfully parsed a group of options.
Parsing a group of options: input url manifest.mpd.
Successfully parsed a group of options.
Opening an input file: manifest.mpd.
[NULL @ 0x7feff2000800] Opening 'manifest.mpd' for reading
[file @ 0x7feff1c0b100] Setting default whitelist 'file,crypto'
[AVIOContext @ 0x7feff1c0b2c0] Statistics: 28989 bytes read, 0 seeks
manifest.mpd: Invalid data found when processing input
Regarding your FFMPEG issue, you need to build/obtain FFmpeg with --enable-libxml2 configuration enabled to correctly parse a manifest.mpd file.

You can check whether your FFmpeg supports libxml2 by simply running it without any arguments. Here is the output from FFmpeg 4.1 I built with --enable-libxml2 (see --enable-libxml2 in the start of the 4th line of the output):

%./ffmpeg

ffmpeg version n4.1-10-g59e30c05d7 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers   
built with gcc 5.4.0 (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.6) 20160609
 configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-openssl 
--enable-libxml2 --enable-libssh --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx 
--enable-libwavpack --enable-libwebp --enable-libx264 
--enable-libx265 --enable-libxvid --enable-libzmq 
--enable-libzvbi --enable-libopus --enable-libpulse --enable-gmp --enable-libmodplug --enable-nonfree
          libavutil      56. 22.100 / 56. 22.100
          libavcodec     58. 35.100 / 58. 35.100
          libavformat    58. 20.100 / 58. 20.100
          libavdevice    58.  5.100 / 58.  5.100
          libavfilter     7. 40.101 /  7. 40.101
          libswscale      5.  3.100 /  5.  3.100
          libswresample   3.  3.100 /  3.  3.100
          libpostproc    55.  3.100 / 55.  3.100
        Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder


Regarding your question above, once you have a working FFmpeg with --enable-libxml2, you can transcode the .mpd to .mp4:

ffmpeg -i manifest.mpd -codec copy out.mp4


Note: I use -codec copy above to avoid transcoding of actual video and audio.