How to download videos from Yuketang

I don’t like the Yuketang interface. There’s many advantages to watching lectures playback. I like to watch video on VLC, where I can take notes and index parts of it. I got interested in this. Here’s a quick and dirty way to download videos.

Video

1. Inspect element (works best in chrome) first, go to Network, choose Media and then click ‘直播回放‘/Playback。
2. Get the m3u8 link and copy it.
3. Get streamlink. In your favorite terminal, run streamlink "m3u8 link" best -o output.mp4 You can choose worst in place of best for a lower-quality download.

MP3 recording (similar）

1. Inspect element (works best in chrome) first, go to Network, choose Media and then click ‘直播回放‘/Playback。
   My audio recording lectures are broken up into chunks, so I painstakingly retrieve all the links individually. You can also download the page source or .har file and grep out all the mp3 files. Let’s say I have links A B C
2. In your favorite terminal, run wget --output-document=combined.mp3 A B C

Let me know if you have any problems or have a cleaner way to get it done.

More related topics I’d like to explore

• The general art of pulling videos off the internet
• Legal issues. youtube-dl is a popular tool also for this purpose recently served it’s death sentence for DMCA rights
• Should content providers be allowed to legislate this kind of protection against you storing their data?
• No matter what a company does, the video can always be saved - the worst case is someone films it.