secluded/content/posts/downloading-courses-from-linux-academy.md at 650eddb495926ce0b16bdd4ef92a78e8e7b68cc5

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Every month, Linux Academy releases courses for free. I'm a very busy college student and don't have time to whirl through everything I want to before it goes behind their paywall again so I figured out how to download a course or two every month using youtube-dl.

Setup

Install youtube-dl
Make sure you have a browser handy
Create a community account on Linux Academy
Get some food
Maybe a drink
Sit back down in your chair
Spin around a bit
Read on

Downloading

Log into your account
Pick the course you want
Open the developer console and go to Network (Ctrl+Shift+E in Firefox)
You'll want to select Media as shown in the screenshot below

In moving my posts around, this screenshot has disappeared 🤷

Click the video you want to start with
Watch the network logs
You'll see an entry that starts with playlist (screenshot below)

In moving my posts around, this screenshot has disappeared 🤷

Right click it
Copy the URL
Paste it after youtube-dl in a terminal:

amolith@poseidon:~ $ youtube-dl https://video-cdn.linuxacademy.com/vods3/_definst_/smil:box/cdnstore/modules/lots-of-stuff-in-here

Press enter
Watch the magic unfold

At a high level, youtube-dl is acting like your browser and following the m3u playlist to download chunks of the file. After it fetches them all, it runs them through ffmpeg to stitch them together into a single video!

I found it useful to open a text editor and script downloading a whole course at a time. All you have to do is type youtube-dl -o and copy/paste it however many times there are videos. Then, copy and paste the video title in quotes after -o and add .mp4 to the end (command example below). After that, paste the URL. Do that with every video in the series, save the script, run chmod +x <script>, then ./<script> and (after a bit) you'll have an entire course you can watch at your leasure!

amolith@poseidon:~ $ youtube-dl -o "04 - Conclusion and Next Steps.mp4" https://video-cdn.linuxacademy.com/vods3/_definst_/smil:box/cdnstore/modules/lots-of-stuff-here

NOTE: You may want to set up your directory structure beforehand so it's easier to script the process. Here's an example of one of mine:

amolith@poseidon:~/Videos/Courses/Ansible - Playbooks Deep Dive $ tree
.
+-- 01 - Course Overview
|   +-- 01 - About the Course.mp4
|   +-- 02 - About the Training Architect.mp4
|   +-- 03 - Course Features and Tools.mp4
|   +-- 04 - About Ansible Playbooks.mp4
|   \-- 05 - Advanced Inventory Configuration.mp4
+-- 02 - Playbook Basics
|   +-- 01 - Using YAML for Ansible Playbooks.mp4
|   +-- 02 - Creating an Ansible Play.mp4
|   +-- 03 - The ansible-playbook Command.mp4
|   \-- 04 - Understanding Playbook Tasks.mp4
+-- 03 - Essential Playbook Syntax
|   +-- 01 - Using Variables in Playbooks.mp4
|   +-- 02 - Working with Templates.mp4
|   +-- 03 - Using Ansible Facts.mp4
|   +-- 04 - Conditional Execution in Playbooks.mp4
|   +-- 05 - Using Loops in Ansible.mp4
|   \-- 06 - Working with Handlers in Ansible.mp4
+-- 04 - Advanced Playbook Syntax
|   +-- 01 - Executing Selective Parts of a Playbook.mp4
|   +-- 02 - Working with Sensitive Data Using Ansible Vault.mp4
|   +-- 03 - Error Handling in a Playbook: limit, ignore_errors, changed_when, and failed_when.mp4
|   +-- 04 - Error Handling in a Playbook: Block Groups and The Debug Module.mp4
|   +-- 05 - Asynchronous Tasks within a Playbook.mp4
|   +-- 06 - Delegating Playbook Execution with delegate_to and local_action.mp4
|   +-- 07 - Parallelism in Playbooks.mp4
|   +-- 08 - Using run_once.mp4
|   +-- 09 - Overview of Ansible Roles.mp4
|   \-- 10 - Ansible Role Demo.mp4
\-- 05 - Conclusion and Next Steps.mp4

4 directories, 26 files
amolith@poseidon:~/Videos/Courses/Ansible - Playbooks Deep Dive $

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