Web Video Downloader （在线视频下载工具）

This project is a spider-like tool for downloading videos in browser . For example, I want to download one of my favourite cartoons named 《Zombie Cats》, it can be found in bilibili, url is http://www.bilibili.com/video/av6376703/. Three ways for you to download the video, register in bilibili, use fiddler(or other softwares) to capture the address of video, or use my tool.

Platform

This small script is written in python 3.5, using some easy-install packages, all listed below.

• built-in packages : os, time, requests, argparse, threading.
• selenium : You can install by pip3 install selenium.
• browsermob-proxy : You can install by pip3 install browsermob-proxy. Then, download browsermob-proxy from here, add its bin path to environment PATH variable. You can see there're two files browsermob-proxy and browsermob-proxy.bat in directory bin.
• Firefox : This tool needs firefox. Remember to add your firefox path to environment variable, or you need to specify where firefox is when you execute this tool. However, other browsers like Chrome, Opera, etc, are also supported, and you need to install some plugins. I didn't test them, so I will not show how to configure, but search selenium chrome driver may help you. If you have firefox, check your version. My firefox is FF48( the latest version) . I suggest you followed my introduction to install FF48, since firefox is the easiest way to configure.
• wires : This is a plugin designed by firefox team, which is used to support selenium, you can download it from here, make sure that the geckodriver is version 0.9, DONT USE 0.10 if you use FF47 or later versions, because there's a bug related. The detail about this bug is here. After you download this zip file, unzip it, and you will get onefile geckodriver.exe. Rename it to wires.exe, and put it under the same directory with my tool.

EXPLANATION

• This tool use selenium to simulate your actions. For example, you want to download Zombie Cats, give a url to this tool, it will open your browser, just like what you do if you want to watch it online. However, it will parse all the links created in the period loading the page, and get the most probably url for the real video. Since most of websites do not set their videos to a permanent link, it's hard to get the real link to videos using tranditional spiders. I use browsermob-proxy, which redirects the data flow to a monitor. After assigned waiting-time, the tool will close the browser and start downloading all the videos found in page. So the waiting-time is important, if you give a short time, like 1s, the real video link may not be received yet.
• For FF47 and later versions, selenium needs DesiredCapabilities to start firefox, in code, they are line 46 to line 49.
• My tool only search urls containing mp4, flv, avi, rmvb and rm. If you want to contain more suffixs, modify line 40 or line 88. I didn't provide any parameter for suffixs because you can add more suffixs when you create the Simulator object.

Usage

Just run python3 video_capture.py <parameters>. Videos will be downloaded into folder download, and renamed by their numbers. Also, you can download the executable binary file video_capture.exe from my cloud storage: here. The parameters are:

• --url: the url for the page which contains your target video.
• --time: the WAITING TIME, that is, when this tool open your browser, how much time will the browser alive. Which is also the time my tool capture urls. I suggest you use default, which is 30s. It depends on websites. bilibili needs no more than 10s, but youku may need 60s, since its advertisements are already 45s, after these advertisements, the server sends real link for video.
• --bin: the path to your firefox.exe, if you have configured the PATH variable, this parameter is not required.
• --proxy: the path to your browsermob-proxy.bat, if you have configured the PATH variable, this parameter is not required.
• ATTENTIONS : This tool can easily download videos in Bilibili, but for youku or other websites, their servers cut a video into several pieces , so my tool will receive theses pieces. In such condition, I suggest you should not use this tool, since these pieces must be combined to a complete video, but my tool doesn't support this function. Also, to get these pieces' links, you must set WAITING TIME a large number. That's annoying.
• Example: video_capture.exe --url=http://www.bilibili.com/video/av6376703/ --time=10 --bin=C:\Firefox\firefox.exe --proxy=C:\browsermob-proxy-2.0-beta-6\bin\browsermob-proxy.bat, this command will download Zombie Cats 51 into folder download. In this example, I didn't configure my PATH variable, so I need to assign where firefox is and where browsermob-proxy.bat is. Here time is 10, so after 10 seconds, the tool will download the video.

Update-logs

• 2016-9-23: Add this project.
• 2016-10-6: Rename and build repository.

License

All codes in this repository are licensed under the terms you may find in the file named "LICENSE" in this directory.