1y ago

Most reliable way to download embedded videos?

I'm looking for a good, reliable way to download embedded YouTube videos. These videos are not always accessible on YouTube.com, so the method can't be specific to that site. Thanks for any recommendations!

15 comments

YT-DLP always works great for YouTube and some other sites. There are also a few browser extensions around, called similar to Video Download Helper. But don't install the super fishy ones, I don't know which of them are good.
- This works for so many sites. Sometimes it is worth checking the formats the ste streams, because many of us don't really need that 4K clip of a video with lossless 7.1 surround sound audio.
  It also works for podcasts.
  Of you are on a site that has a stream that cannot be grabbed by yt-dlp you can look for other, sometimes sketchy, tools that can get the job done.
  If you like to pull your hair out a bit, you can inspect the page (not look at the source, but use the web inspector) and find a link to the streams. Occasionally you may need to download the audio and the video separately and put them together after downloading.
  I need to do this regularly for colleagues.
  
  In my experience nowadays video is often streamed with something like hls and pieced together with a javascript player. If that's the case inspecting the source won't help you much as its hundreds of 4s snippets or something like that. It could be worth a try but often times you really need a tool to do it.

Media Downloader - https://github.com/mhogomchungu/media-downloader
It's a front end for yt-dlp, but lets you add other plugins too. I find it easier to use, because of the gui options :)
- Tyvm!

I don't know that I've ever had jdownloader 2 fail to download a video- maybe give that a go.
- 95% of the sites I tried jDownloader works. Nice thing is, you can just copy and paste the URL if the site, no need to crawl for the video stream url.
  Highly recommended
  
  You don’t even have to paste 😉