How to download videos from Coursera with curl

curl

Downloading videos from Coursera is not as easy as copy and pasting the link in terminal. I also have tried exporting cookies from my browser in cookie.txt file and doing a:

curl --cookie cookie.txt "https://class.coursera.org/comnetworks-2012-001/lecture/download.mp4?lecture_id=37"

as suggested in this question but that produces a file named download.mp4?lecture_id=37 with nothing in it.

Can somebody tell me how can I download those video lectures? because downloading them with browser is a risk (I have a slow connection and if by chance if some error occurs my too much time is wasted in re-downloading it).

Best Answer

As with any web service, the exact method changes a lot.

In the coursera-dl project, we try to do all the magic. The code involves jumping through some redirects and keeping cookies in place (which changes almost at every login), but you can run it with the --debug option to see how it calls curl or wget or your preferred downloader.

Disclaimer: I am a contributor to the project.

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How to use curl to download content from sourceforge

You can do

curl -L  http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/romfs/genromfs/0.5.2/genromfs-0.5.2.tar.gz > genromfs.tar.gz

to download the file.

The -L tells curl to follow any redirects, which sourceforge normally does.

If wget is available, that would be far simpler.

Extract download progress from curl output

The main issue is that sed works on lines so it doesn't do anything until the first \n is reached and that doesn't happen until your command is finished. You can get around this by exchanging \rs with \ns:

$ curl --progress-bar http://127.0.0.1/test.tar.bz2 -o test.tar.bz2 2>&1 | 
   tr $'\r' $'\n' | sed -r 's/[# ]+/#/g;'

This, however, brings you up against buffering, sed will now act on groups of lines. The final solution I hacked together was to redirect the error to a file and then deal with that file:

$ curl --progress-bar http://127.0.0.1/test.tar.bz2 -o test.tar.bz2 2>er
$ while :; do 
    echo -ne "$(tr $'\r' $'\n' < er | tail -n 1 | sed -r 's/^[# ]+/#/;')\r"; 
  done

The command above will parse the error file (er) and print the result with an \r making it update constantly. You will need to break out of it manually.

Suggestion from an anonymous user: You can also put stdbuf -oL in front of tr and sed thus modifying the buffering behaviour of those commands.

Best Answer

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