How to download PyCon US 2013 videos for offline viewing using youtube-dl

By Vasudev Ram


As Pythonistas would know, PyCon US 2013 happened recently.

While reading Python news on the Net, I saw that the videos of the conference were being uploaded to pyvideo.org.

I browsed the list of videos there. Since I had recently come across youtube-dl, a YouTube downloader tool, I thought of trying to download the PyCon videos using it.

When I went to the pyvideo site to do that, and played one or two videos available there, I was not sure at first whether they were from YouYube or not, so was not sure whether I could download them using youtube-dl.

A little experimentation showed that they were in fact hosted on YouTube, and I was able to find out how to download them, and then downloaded a few of them.

So I'm giving the steps for doing that below:

(Note: these steps worked for me - I could download a few videos using the steps, and none have given an error so far, but YMMV, depending on your OS, browser, Flash Player version, or other factors.)

Update: before (or after) reading these steps, you may wish to read the comments on this post. Some readers commented, and gave simpler methods of doing the same thing, in particular, some said that there is a direct link to download the video on some or all of the pyvideo video pages, and some said that the URL-fixing step is not needed since you can just right-click on the video to get the right URL without the extraneous stuff. Also, renaming the video to remove the extraneous stuff in the name can be avoided by using some command-line options of youtube-dl.

- Go to pyvideo.org in your browser.

- Select the category called PyCon US 2013 videos.

- Select one of the videos from that category and open the link to the video in another browser tab (or in the same tab).

For example, try Guido van Rossum's keynote at PyCon US 2013.

- Click the share video icon at the top right of the video screen; it looks like a V (with small knobs at its vertices), but rotated to the right by 90 degrees.

- The top left of the video screen will now show the URL for the video (along with buttons to share it on Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

- Hover your mouse over that URL and then right click it. You may have to right-click twice, or first click on the URL and then right-click on it.

- From the Adobe Flash Player pop-up menu that appears, select "Copy video URL".

- Now, open a DOS command prompt. I am using Windows in this example; adjust the steps for Linux or Mac OS X, i.e. use a bash or other shell and modify the steps for copy and paste below, to suit your OS.

- At the prompt (Windows), type the partial command:

youtube-dl -t (followed by a space)

- Then type Alt-Space, then E, then P.

- That brings up the Windows system menu for the DOS window, and then selects the Edit menu in it, and then the Paste option from that menu.

- So the video URL will get pasted to the end of youtube-dl command you typed earlier.

- Now, if you just try to run the command as it is, it may not work (for downloading by youtube-dl), because of some extra parameters in the URL, that youtube-dl cannot handle.

- For example, here is the copied video URL for the GvR keynote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n6dUWXRdt48

- Edit the URL using arrow keys, backspace, delete key, etc., to remove the part from "feature" upto "embedded&"; in other words (using HTTP request terms), remove all the key-value pairs except for the "v=something" pair.

- Using the above GvR keynote example, the command-line should now look like this:

youtube-dl -t http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6dUWXRdt48

- Now hit Enter, and wait while the video downloads. The -t option to youtube-dl will add the title of the video as a prefix to the download filename. I typically rename the file to remove the cryptic characters after the title, like this:

c:\downloads> ren Keynote-n6dUWXRdt48.flv GvR-Keynote.flv

- Now you can play the video in VLC, MPlayer or any other suitable player.

Enjoy.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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