🎧 Downloading Twitter Spaces

Overview

Twitter Spaces (X spaces?) are a great "town-hall" platform, but it can be hard to re-listen to an event. Playback controls are iffy and in general, a downloaded copy of a recording offers much more flexibility.

Unfortunately, Twitter does not natively support downloading a recorded space.

Fortunately, yt-dlp (formerly youtube-dl) and ffmpeg exist!

Prerequisites

you have yt-dlp installed
you have ffmpeg installed
you have a link to a Twitter spaces replay.

On a Mac, yt-dlp and ffmpeg can be installed using homebrew with the following command:

brew install ffmpeg yt-dlp

Find the Recording URL

For this walkthrough I will be using a replay from a Twitter Space hosted by Pieces foe Developers titled "AI for Developer Productivity" which you should 100% listen to.

The URL for the replay is here: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1ZkKzjkVwzLKv

Plug for Pieces here. Seriously, it's already completely overhauled my workflow and you should check it out!

Chrome Dev Tools

Link in hand (or in clipboard) open a Chrome web browser and then open the Developer Tools panel. This can be done by either clicking the three dots menu in the upper right corner of the Chrome window > More Tools > Developer Tools or by using the hotkey ⌘⌥I (Command + Option + I).

In the Developer Tools panel, navigate to the Network tab and enter m3u into the filter box.

dev-tools-network-tab

Paste in the spaces replay link from above into the address bar and hit enter.

Watch the filtered content in the Network tab. You are looking for an entry similar to:

playlist_16732160847824420797.m3u8?type=replay

The key element is the type=replay suffix.

devtools-filtered-results

Right click on this entry and select Copy > Copy URL from the menu.

devtool-copy-recording-url

Download the Recording

In a terminal window, navigate to the location you would like to store the recording. For me that is just the Downloads folder for now.

cd ~/Downloads

Use yt-dpl to download the spaces recording with this command:

yt-dpl [playlist_16732160847824420797.m3u8?type=replay](https://prod-fastly-us-east-1.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/cxIaV_kOVKtVFbsr-rugYE7nlh8BEqogOW-AsQwgF4n5q7I9ve0B_DrmtotFaAEpYpmMJ7A3G8BTdBnNukeHJQ/non_transcode/us-east-1/periscope-replay-direct-prod-us-east-1-public/audio-space/playlist_16732160847824420797.m3u8\?type\=replay)

terminal-download

Assuming this is working correctly, you will be shown a progress display in the terminal window.

Once complete, you can open the mp4 file in any media player you choose.