A lot of streaming sites use HLS (HTTP Live Streaming): video is sent as a chain of small chunks. That’s fine until you hit buffering, stutter, or pauses between segments. Sometimes you just want to point a normal video player at a file and watch it without the stream getting in the way.

Stream Spool is a small Bash tool that does exactly that. You give it the stream URL (usually the playlist link from the site), and it downloads the segments in the background and stitches them into a single file. You open that file in any video player and watch while it’s still downloading. No re-encoding, no fuss—and when you’re done, you can finalize to an MP4 to keep.

It’s resumable, so if you stop and run it again with the same URL, it picks up where it left off. Install is a single command into a user directory (no sudo). You need curl and ffmpeg on your system.

If that sounds useful, the project is here: Stream Spool on GitHub. The README has the one-line install and tips for finding the stream URL in your browser.