So there is an awesome command line tool out there called livestreamer. It’s awesome because you can use it to stream your favourite live things, via command line! No more watching it through a browser and have flash (or even just chrome) clogging up resources. Pretty cool huh?
Another cool thing it can do it save directly to file, so if you knew you couldn’t watch it while its live (say your at work) just stream straight to file and watch later
I make this post because I use this quite a lot, and usually I specify the file name as stream .mp4. As I am no expert in video/audio file formats and codecs etc I had no idea that streaming files have their own format. This was helpful as when I was saving into the mp4 format, other tools I was using (castnow) where having difficulties reading the file properly. It’s expecting an mp4 but obviously it’s not an mp4 file. So the correct format to save a hls stream to (as I mostly watch twitch, and this is the format of their streams) is stream .ts
Hope this helps someone else out too, as it took me ages to find this info. Buried deep in a git issue