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`](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/).
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!
```bash
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:
```bash
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 $