Scriber Pro: Transcribe web videos and M3U8 streams on your Mac

Offline AI transcription for Mac. Paste a web page link, pick the video Scriber finds on it, and get the transcript, even on pages behind a Canvas or Kaltura sign-in. It's built into the app, not a browser extension: Scriber finds the M3U8 (HLS) stream behind the player and fetches it directly instead of recording it, so an 11-minute lecture took 47 seconds. Also batch files and YouTube links. Transcription runs locally with Whisper. $3.99 once, no subscription.

Hi Product Hunt! I built Scriber Pro because getting a transcript of a lecture or webinar meant fighting browser extensions, dev tools and yt-dlp before you could even start. Scriber 2.0 does it in one step: paste the page link, pick the video, and it transcribes it on your Mac. It also handles batches of files and YouTube links, and nothing is uploaded. I'd love to hear which sites you'd want it to work with.

Before launch day, I want to talk about the problem Scriber Pro 2.0 is built around, because it's weirder than it looks.

Why it's hard. Most web video players don't point at a video file. They load an M3U8 playlist (HLS): a list of hundreds of small chunks, often in several qualities, sometimes with the audio in a separate track. The player stitches them together inside the browser, and the page's video element only holds a blob: address that exists in that one tab. So "save video" gets you nothing, and copying the link usually gives you a blob URL no other app can open.

The usual workaround. Open the browser's developer tools, filter the network tab for .m3u8, copy the right playlist, pass it (plus your login cookies, if the page needs a sign-in) to yt-dlp or ffmpeg, wait for the download, then drag the file into a transcription app. Or record the audio while it plays, which takes as long as the video.

Why it doesn't always work, even with the right tools:

Before launch day, I want to talk about the problem Scriber Pro 2.0 is built around, because it's weirder than it looks.

Why it doesn't always work, even with the right tools:

Scriber Pro

Transcribe web videos and M3U8 streams on your Mac

Transcribe web videos and M3U8 streams on your Mac

Forum Threads

Why is transcribing a web video (M3U8) so hard, and why don't transcription apps do it?

Forum Threads

Why is transcribing a web video (M3U8) so hard, and why don't transcription apps do it?