Downloading courses from Linux Academy

Forward ¶

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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