TIL: Download embeded Vimeo video with youtube-dl

:til: :youtube-dl:

youtube-dl usually easily detects which content and how to download it from given URL. But if webpage contains embeded videos from Vimeo it might not work. I’m not sure if this is an issue for any embeded video or just for restricted ones. I needed to download some media from members-only area so I could watch those on a plane but was struggling.

There is a workaround:

1. Open “Network” tab on “Developers Tools” in a browser.
2. Click video to play and pause it.
3. New network request will appear wich contains .json?base64_init=1 in part of URL. This is the request we need.
4. Modify URL to replace the mentioned part to .mpd. For example: https://site.com/something.json?base64_init=1&param=val should become https://site.com/something.mpd?param=val
5. Use youtube-dl <URL> to download video where <URL> is modified URL.