Download private youtube videos

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I do not support download of private videos to violate terms of service. This KB is to highlight use of browser inspection features to get detail of what is going on at backend in any site.

Using Firefox make sure you have the access to watch the private YouTube video. Once the video owner grants you access, you can follow the steps to download it:

1. Just open the private YouTube video watching page. From there, right-click and select Inspect Element.
2. In the Developers Tools, click on Network and then select Media under the Network tool. Then you’ll see only the HTTP requests made to media files, like audio and video files. If you don’t, reload this page.
3. Click on each link to see the content type. You may see "audio/mp4" or "video/mp4". If you want to download the video, then you want to look for a link with "video/mp4" content type
4. For one of the mp4 URLs there will "&range=<no>-<no>" kind of option as part of querystring near the end. Copy and paste the URL in the address bar, remove the range parameter in the query string and press Enter.
5. When the video or audio loaded, right-click and select "Save As" to download
6. Sometimes the same URL when opened in other tab may not work if the site is checking for referrer, cookies or some other HTTP header. In that case we can get matching headers for video by right clicking the media link and choosing "Copy Value -> Copy as cURL" option. Then copy the string in terminal and append '--output <filename>' to save the curl output to file.

   This was found to be needed while trying to download zoom meeting recordings.

Refer:

• https://www.iotransfer.net/tips/download-private-youtube-video-1146.php

Note that above steps also worked while trying to download a password protected zoom webinar using firefox.

Home > Cracking techniques > Download private youtube videos