How do I download a video from a website

September 27, 2017 9:05 AM

I produced and shot a story on a paralympian for Wired.com and I never received the finished edited piece. I'd like to download the piece Wired published but can't find a way to download the high res file for my vimeo page.

I've reached out to the editors I worked with on the piece last year and everyone has moved on. Such is life in the editorial industry. I've tried various chrome extensions to grab the video file but it only downloads chunks that I have to put together in premiere and a few of the chunks are low res. Here's a link to the video and I swear it's my content so there's no copyright issues.

https://www.wired.com/video/the-tech-that-s-pushing-a-paralympian-closer-to-gold

posted by photoslob to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Looks like wired is using youtube to host that file with an interface change that obfuscates that, so:

If you want a GUI: 4K Video Downloader (free version).
No GUI: youtube-dl.

And then paste in their youtube link for the same video.


The 1080p version is available that way, although it's not clear if by "high res file" you want something even higher res.
posted by bluecore at 9:51 AM on September 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

I don't know if it exists for Chrome, but I was able to grab the video using the Video DownloadHelper extension in Firefox. The final file is an 33.4 MB MP4, if that helps you determine whether this is a high res file.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 9:55 AM on September 27, 2017

youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5USrYMMdSro (uppercase F)
will print a list of all available video and audio formats.

Pick one and do youtube-dl -f FORMAT URL (lowercase f) to fetch it.

Some formats are audio-only or video-only, if you want to mux 2 of those to a single video file do youtube-dl -f X+Y URL, where X is the video-only and Y is the audio-only format.

youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5USrYMMdSro
will pick the best quality video and audio currently available if you don't know what to choose.

The bad news: None of the available options will be your original video file: YouTube recompresses everything and AFAIK regular users can never retrieve the master from them.
posted by Bangaioh at 10:23 AM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you! I was able to download the 1080p version which is all I need for my vimeo page.
posted by photoslob at 7:28 PM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]