CCLE Video Downloader

About

A Firefox addon and Python script to download videos from CCLE.

Installation

All Platforms

1. Install the youtube-dl library for Python by running pip install youtube-dl.

For Windows

1. Copy the app\windows\ccle_video_downloader.bat.example file to app\windows\ccle_video_downloader.bat. On line 3, change "C:\Path\To\CCLE video downloader\app" to match the location of the app folder.
2. Copy the app\ccle_video_downloader.json.example file to app\ccle_video_downloader.json. Within the file, change the path key to the path to the app\windows\ccle_video_downloader.bat file. All backslashes (\) in the path must be escaped by using two backslashes (\\).
3. Copy the app\windows\set_location.reg.example file to app\windows\set_location.reg. On lines 4 and 7, change "C:\\Path\\To\\CCLE video downloader\\app\\ccle_video_downloader.json" to match the location of the app\ccle_video_downloader.json file. All backslashes (\) in the path must be escaped by using two backslashes (\\). Run the file to install the required registry keys.
4. Copy the app\config.example file to app\config. Edit the path option to set where you want to save the files to.
5. Add all files in the add-on folder to a .zip archive. To do this, select all the files in the add-on folder, right click, and select Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder.
6. In Firefox, visit the about:debugging page by entering it into the URL bar. Select This Firefox on the left menu, and click Load Temporary Add-on.... Select the .zip file created in step 5.
7. At this point, you are all set. Refer to the Usage section on how to download videos.
8. Remove the extension after downloading the videos you want.

For Mac/Linux

TODO

Usage

On a page with a CCLE video, press the play button of the video you want to download. A notification will appear near the top of the screen. At this point, the video will begin downloading. You may pause the video or close the tab.

How this works

The browser add-on is composed of a background and a content-script. The background script listens for URLs that match this filter: https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/*a.m3u8*. Those URLs contain the information required to download the video. When a request with a URL that matches that filter is made, the background script executes the content script in the tab from where the request was made. The content script displays a notification (a toast) and looks for the class name and video title. The notification indicates that a video has begun downloading. The class name and video title are derived from the CCLE page by using the navigation links at the top. The content script then sends the class name and video information to the background script, which then bundles that information with the video URL and sends it to the external Python script.

The external Python script receives the video information. From that, it creates (if not existing already) a sub-folder for the class, and downloads the video into that sub-folder. The script uses the Youtube-dl library. The base directory to download videos into can be configured using the config file in the app directory.

Communication between the Firefox add-on and the Python script is done using the "NativeMessaging" API.

To-do

• Test without the tabs permission, it might not be necessary
• Find a way to avoid using the <all_urls> permission
• Support pages with multiple videos (only one video will be downloaded if a page has multiple videos)
• Provide more useful notifications
• Support Mac/Linux better
• Write an initialization script that automatically generates the directory-dependent files
• Add option to ask for confirmation before downloading files
• Add warning when add-on cannot communicate with downloader script
• Detect when youtube-dl is not installed and display error in browser window