Deconstructing NYTimes Video Streaming: Building a High-Performance Extraction Engine with HLS and FFmpeg

Introduction As developers, we are often fascinated by how global-scale platforms manage and distribute multimedia data. The New York Times (NYTimes), a premier global news organization, utilizes a sophisticated distribution architecture that isn't just simple file hosting, but a complex system based on HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) for dynamic adaptive delivery. For researchers, journalists, and developers, archiving high-quality news video from NYTimes has immense technical and historical value. H