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Glossary

M3U8

Also known as: HLS playlist, .m3u8 file

HLS is Apple's streaming protocol, designed in 2009 and now used by Twitch, TikTok, Apple TV+, and a large portion of live-streaming infrastructure. The .m3u8 playlist file references either a list of .ts video chunks (typically 6-10 seconds each) or another set of .m3u8 playlists representing different quality levels for adaptive bitrate switching.

When you encounter an M3U8 URL while trying to download a video, you cannot just download the .m3u8 file — it's only a few KB of text and contains no video. To get the actual video as a single file, you need to download all the referenced .ts chunks, concatenate them, and (typically) remux into MP4. FFmpeg can do this in one command: ffmpeg -i playlist.m3u8 -c copy output.mp4.

Most online HLS-to-MP4 tools (including DropZap for HLS-served platforms) automate this entire chunk-fetch-and-merge process server-side, returning a clean MP4 file ready to play.

Related terms

DASH Streaming
DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP), also called MPEG-DASH, is a streaming protocol that splits video and audio into separate files and lets the player request the best quality based on current bandwidth. Reddit, Twitter / X, and Facebook all use DASH for video delivery.
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is an open-source command-line library for handling video and audio: it can convert between formats, extract audio, merge video and audio streams, transcode codecs, trim clips, and much more. It is the underlying engine inside almost every video tool on the internet, including online converters and downloaders.
MP4
MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is a digital container format that holds video, audio, subtitles, and metadata in a single file. It is the dominant video format on the modern internet — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X / Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all serve videos as MP4 internally.
H.264
H.264 (also called AVC, Advanced Video Coding) is the most widely used video compression codec on the internet. It compresses raw video into a much smaller file while preserving high visual quality, and it is the codec inside virtually every MP4 file served by TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X / Twitter, and Reddit.