How to use Youtube-dl effectively to download AGU 2020 oral talk videos

Hongyu Xiao

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

1 Download and install the youtube-dl package

1.1 Youtube-dl website and github page

You could find the youtube-dl package from its website or github webpage to download and install the package

Youtube-dl webpage:https://youtube-dl.org/

Youtube-dl github site:http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/

Here is how the website looks like :

1.2 Click download

And you will the following webpage. Please follow the listed instructions and finish the install of youtube-dl

1.3 Tips

During the install of the youtube-dl package, it actually could be tricky and get lost without knowing if you are successful or not. My suggestion is : after you install the package, try the following command

youtube-dl in your terminal/CMD/Powershell/WSL

And if you installed the youtube-dl successfully. You will see the following message:

Congradulations! Youtube-dl is installed and lets move to next step to find the video you wanted.

2 Locate the right video from the html webpage element

For example, on AGU 202 website, you found the following talk very interesting. ( They did not sponsor this article for clicks)

On the empty space of the webpage, right click and select

inspect/inspect elements

Then you will see the something like the following:

You do not have to panic when you see all the webpage information, we just need to grad what we need and close this webpage. On the upper right panel, click any random line under the element tab.

Ctr+F and type iframe=

You should be seeing the line containing the location of the video.

You might need to adjust the scroll bar to see the full line. And your goal here is to double click or copy and paste the address within the double quote symbols.

For this example, the content should be

https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm20/videogateway.cgi/id/32465?recordingid=32465&iframe=1

3 Navigate to download directory and download videos

OK, now you have your video location.

Open the terminal/cmd/powershell and navigate to the folder you would like to download the video

type

youtube-dl https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm20/videogateway.cgi/id/32465?recordingid=32465&iframe=1

Then your desired AGU video download will begin instantly.

Thank you for reading and happy learning about earth science!