Streaming protocols

There are many types of streaming protocols used by services today and Streamlink supports most of them. It's possible to tell Streamlink to access a streaming protocol directly instead of relying on a plugin to extract the streams from a URL for you.

Playing built-in streaming protocols directly

A streaming protocol can be accessed directly by specifying it in the protocol://URL format with an optional list of parameters, like so:

$ streamlink "protocol://https://streamingserver/path key1=value1 key2=value2"

Depending on the input URL, the explicit protocol scheme may be omitted. The following example shows HLS streams (.m3u8) and DASH streams (.mpd):

$ streamlink "https://streamingserver/playlist.m3u8"
$ streamlink "https://streamingserver/manifest.mpd"

Supported streaming protocols

Name

Explicit prefix

Apple HTTP Live Streaming

hls://

MPEG-DASH

dash://

Progressive HTTP/HTTPS

httpstream://

Note

Local files can be read by adding the file:// scheme to the URL component.

Protocol parameters

When passing parameters to the built-in streaming protocols, the values will either be treated as plain strings or they will be interpreted as Python literals:

$ streamlink "httpstream://https://streamingserver/path method=POST params={'abc':123} json=['foo','bar','baz']"
method="POST"
params={"key": 123}
json=["foo", "bar", "baz"]

The parameters from the example above are used to make an HTTP POST request with abc=123 added to the query string and ["foo", "bar", "baz"] used as the content of the HTTP request's body (the serialized JSON data).

Some parameters allow you to configure the behavior of the streaming protocol implementation directly:

$ streamlink "hls://https://streamingserver/path start_offset=123 duration=321 force_restart=True"

Available parameters

Parameters are passed to the following methods of their respective stream implementations: