VideoDownloader

This is a simple video downloader that I made for my sister.

As her school was closed due to COVID-19, she had online classes from a third party training institution. They uploaded tutorial videos to their website with no download option. They also put a deadline after which they remove the uploaded videos.

My sister was unable to view some videos uploaded on June 2020 and the deadline was close by. So, I decided to help her in downloading the videos.

Initially, I tried to get a link to the video by inspecting it. But I found that they were dynamically fetching parts of the video as .ts files. Each of these files contain only a small portion of the video ( aprox. 10 seconds ). But the interesting thing about them is that they are public ( does not require any authentication token for downloading a part if you know the url ), and each part was named in a sequential order ( like 00001.ts, 00002.ts etc... ).

How to use this tool

I am having a Linux system, and so, I am using utilities found in Linux. The overall working is as follows:

1. Generate a text file containing the URL of all ts files ( parts of video )
2. Download all these parts using a program called wget. The text file generated in step 1 will be used as input for the wget command.
3. Combine all the downloaded ts files into a single ts file
4. Convert the ts file generated in step 3 into a mp4 video file

Step 1: Generate text file

I have written a simple Java program - Generate.java which can be used to generate the text file containing all URLs. Edit this program according to your URL. Then compile it with command java Generate.java and run it with command java Generate. The program will generate a text file urls.txt.

Step 2: Download the files

From your Linux terminal, run the download.sh shell script. Make sure that the download script is run from the same directory that contains the urls.txt file. The script will produce a beep sound after the download completes.

Step 3: Combine the files to produce the output file

From your linux terminal, run the concat.sh shell script. Make sure that the concat script is run from the same directory that contains all the downloaded .ts files. The script will generate an output file named all.mp4 which is the full length video generated from the individual .ts files.

Note: You won't be knowing exactly how many parts are there for a video. So, generate a urls.txt file that has a greater number of URLs. The downloader will automatically handle that.

Note: You will need JDK for compiling the Java program. Feel free to use any other method to generate the urls.txt file. The only thing to remember is that you need to have one URL per line.

Note: To get the initial URL, inspect your browser's network tab while you are on the webpage containing the video, and look for a request fetching file with .ts extension.

Note: You need the following programs on your Linux system for running the scripts: wget - for downloading the files ffmpeg - for converting the ts file to mp4 speaker-test - for getting the beep sound after the download completes