[How to] Download Video/Audio from Anywhere

VladTheImplier · January 11, 2021, 9:16pm

There’s a lot of downloaders out there and a lot of them aren’t trustworthy or lack reliability.
This post is an attempt to make downloading videos as reliable as possible for everyone.
As a rule, I will only include software I and the community trust, as well as scripts I wrote myself.

Method Brief

[Live Downloader] [Chrome Extension]

Easy to use chrome extension that downloads most video sources including blobbed streams

[Media-Downloader] [Install] [Windows] [Linux]

This is a frontend to a fork of youtube-dl called ytdlp.

[Video Download Helper] [Install] [Windows] [Linux] [Chrome Extension]

This is a Browser extension + an Installed component

[JDownloader] [Install] [Windows] [Linux] [Mac] [JVM] [NAS]

This is a proprietary downloader. Many people trust it, and I have not heard bad things about it. However you should know, it is claimed to be bundleware (installs sideloaded junk with it). As well though it claims to be open source, I have not been able to find the source code online.

[AllDebrid] [Web Based] [Paid]

AllDebrid is a paid service that centralizes your downloads to one place
Bypasses various download websites speed and bandwidth limits

[Offliberty] [Web Based]

[x9buddy] [Web Based]

[very.ninja] [Web Based]

[pornhubsave] [Web Based]

[TubeOffline] [Web Based]

[Methods]

[Alldebrid]

About

This is a premium download proxy (costs 2.99€/month) that in some instances bypass limitations of filesharing sites. For ex. Mega you can download unlimited. You copy the link of whatever you want to download or stream, and put it in alldebrid to make a link you can use as a bypass.

Interface

How to use

Copy a link of nearly any place and stream/download from the link generated in the bottom.
You can also give it torrent magnets to torrent files for you.

There is a plugin for jdownloader, extensions for browser, and VLC can handle streaming.

[Live Downloader]

About

I found this while looking for an alternative to Video Download Helper. It is 100% open source, no premium is needed. Supports HLS and is just a chrome extension.

Interface

Installation

Go here and install

How to use

When you have a video open, click on the icon.
If you see this:

Then the video wasn’t seen and you’ll need to refresh the page
If you see this:

Then you got some video streams to grab (HLS or DDL)

This does have a “parent” extension as part of a family of extensions you can get if you want:
Bulk Media Downloader

[Media-Downloader]

About:

The Backend technology this runs is a fork of youtube-dl called yt-dlp and aria2c. Because it’s a gui it also does not have a lot of the features of the commandline versions of these tools but it will definitely fit your use case here.

It also allows you to enter options for the downloader so unlike other GUI tools, you can use cookies and http headers to grab things other tools might not.

Interface:

Installation:

You can get the installers here: Installers

How to use:

Right click video and copy url:

Paste into the URL form and hit download:

[Video Download Helper]

About:

This extension is the spiritual successor to “Any video downloader” for you ancient pirates out there.
Similar to live downloader it supports HLS and DDL

Interface:

Installation:

Extension [Chrome]

This requires installing a third-party open-source program to work.

Companion Program

[Git repo] - For you paranoids out there

[JDownloader]

About:

Though I don’t personally use this it is trusted by the community and is quite reliable. Make sure you are careful during installing it as it seems to contain bundleware. Sources claim it is open source but I could not find the source online anywhere.

Interface:

Installation: Installers

[Offliberty]

About:

Link

Offliberty is like the other sites below but this has a bookmarklet (a bookmark that contains some javascript to do cool things) This bookmarklet will take whatever page you have open and append it to the URL for offliberty to handle. for ex, have a youtube video open, click the bookmark, and offliberty will download that youtube video.

Supported Sites:

Basically all of them. It’s hit or miss, so give it a try

Interface:

How to Use:

The bookmarklet can be used as such:

First, make sure your browser’s bookmark toolbar is visible

(Not visible? Choose “Bookmarks Toolbar” in View > Toolbars).

Then, just drag the BOOKMARKLET button to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

In the end of it, what you want is a bookmark containing the following javascript: link

[x9buddy]

About:

Link here

x9buddy is a site where you can grab the element links directly from sites. This avoids problems where the original hosts store the video or use any post processing. Good to get source quality video

Supported Sites:

Basically all of them. It’s hit or miss, so give it a try

Interface:

[very.ninja]

About:

Link here

This is just a website that pulls video content from a URL. It’s generally hit or miss. Usually it hits. There’s a chrome extension for it but I can’t verify how trustworthy it is.

Supported Sites:

Basically all of them. It’s hit or miss, so give it a try

Interface:

[pornhubsave]

About:

Link here

This is a website that takes a pornhub video and provides a download link.

Supported Sites:

Pornhub

Interface:

How to use:

With a pornhub video open, you edit the URL to append “sss” to the end of the domain.

Before: https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph5f1f4ef30f9e8

After: https://www.pornhubsss.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph5f1f4ef30f9e8

You can also just copy the URL, go to: https://xxxsave.net/view_video.php?viewkey=ph5f1f4ef30f9e8

And paste the URL.

[TubeOffline]

About:

Link here

This is a website that allows you to grab content from many sites. There is a list of sites it supports in the webpage

Interface:

Lucifie · January 11, 2021, 10:24pm

Please also add a description for JDownloader if you find it trustworthy enough
It’s an awesome app.

VladTheImplier · January 11, 2021, 10:36pm

Personally I was debating adding Jdownloader. I haven’t used it in a long time and sources say it’s bundleware:

Lucifie · January 11, 2021, 10:56pm

You could show how to skip that

VladTheImplier · January 12, 2021, 1:14am

Jdownloader doesn’t fit the goals of the guide. Jdownloader has a lot of things it doesn’t need and there’s plenty of adequate replacements. For ex. If you want a Jdownloader alternative that doesn’t have a premium tier, is completely open-source and has the majority of developers backing it. Youtube-DLG is the best. It supports an inexhaustive amount of sites.

I didn’t include program downloaders because they’re too intrusive. The goal of the guide is to have a browser extension that handles it easily. The browser extension is using youtube-dl to download video, since youtube-dl is most powerful application there is.

Lucifie · January 12, 2021, 7:10pm

Ok. It’s your topic. Just thought of an easy app that does not require any scripts to setup. The premium part is only for people who have file hoster accounts. The app itself is free. For my part I would not run scripts to download something but thats maybe just me.

VladTheImplier · January 12, 2021, 7:39pm

Fair enough. It’s just a powershell script so you can see what it does. It’s in my gitlab.

# install chocolatey
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
refreshenv

# install dependancies
choco install python peazip nssm

# Microsoft loves to break developers backs
Remove-Item $env:USERPROFILE\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\python*.exe
$env:Path = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","Machine") + ";" + [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","User")
refreshenv

# install and run youtube-dl server
python -m pip install --pre youtube_dl_server
nssm install ytdlh "Python.exe" "-m youtube_dl_server --number-processes 1"
nssm start ytdlh

VladTheImplier · March 31, 2021, 6:32am

I made a complete rewrite of this guide to include all kinds of options.
Let me know what other sources you guys use so I can add them.

Also if anyone needs help with any of them I’m glad to help with installing/how to use them.

burtreynolds · April 18, 2021, 9:18am

Can you help me download from this site?

I’ve tried tubeoffline, video download helper, and very.ninja. JDownloader used to work but not anymore.

VladTheImplier · April 18, 2021, 4:05pm

@burtreynolds It looks like they’re hiding playback behind captcha. Most if not all downloaders will likely fail to get the video content.
Based on my script blocking plugins going insane, I’d recommend using a different site.
If you send me a link to a video I can try and grab it for you.

VladTheImplier · April 18, 2021, 4:48pm

I did some deeper digging.
This site uses a magento plugin made by a security team in the Netherlands that heavily obfuscates their javascript

The code that streams the video is here:

<div+id=‘07b02207602203a02205003607004307406804c04a03007503803002207d’+style=‘height:450px;width:720px’>
</div>

<script+data-cfasync=‘false’+src=‘data:text/javascript;base64,dmFyIHBhID0gZG9jdW1lbnQuY3JlYXRlRWxlbWVudCgnc2NyaXB0Jyk7IAp2YXIgcyA9IGRvY3VtZW50LmdldEVsZW1lbnRzQnlUYWdOYW1lKCdzY3JpcHQnKVswXTsgCiAgICBwYS5zcmMgPSAnaHR0cHM6Ly9zdG9yYWdlLmdvb2dsZWFwaXMuY29tL2xvYWRlcm1haW4uYXBwc3BvdC5jb20vbWFpbi5qcyc7CiAgICBzLnBhcmVudE5vZGUuaW5zZXJ0QmVmb3JlKHBhLCBzKTs=’>

var pa = document.createElement(‘script’);
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0];
pa.src = ‘https://storage.googleapis.com/loadermain.appspot.com/main.js’;
s.parentNode.insertBefore(pa, s);

The code in that google link is completely obfuscated. It can be reversed mostly. But it’s clear they decided to screw performance in favor of security.
It likely possible to get the video, but it’s frankly easier to just record the screen at this point.

burtreynolds · April 19, 2021, 7:36pm

I figured there wasn’t going to be a good solution. I appreciate you looking into it though.

spuzz1127 · May 15, 2021, 2:25am

This site appears to convert many streams, including daftsex.

VladTheImplier · May 15, 2021, 2:53am

Thanks, I’ll take a look at adding it.

Riswan · June 2, 2021, 5:14pm

Thanks for this
I found this site that works for Pornhub, Xvideos, Redtube https://pornhubdownloader.net/

yalivi3453 · June 2, 2021, 5:57pm

Internet Download Manager is a great tool as well.

spuzz1127 · June 4, 2021, 12:54am

I’ve been using 9xbuddy for a few weeks now and it is the best I’ve found so far. It covers many sites and deals with streams well. Also, I found the shortcut very easy to use.

To use the shortcut, put 9xbud.com/ in front of whatever url you have in the address bar. For example, to download a video from PH, use this format:

9xbud.com/https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph6092fbf263121

rubbersexdoll · October 22, 2021, 1:31pm

You can also try Off Liberty… I use it mostly for audio files from soundcloud, but it works for video streams sometimes too.

VladTheImplier · October 29, 2021, 12:26am

I’ll eventually add this, this looks cool. Even has a bookmarklet.

ICWeener · December 29, 2021, 7:16pm

Recently I was digging around to learn more about Youtube downloader (youtube-dl) and found it’s basically a dead project. Might still work but not really supported. New fork is yt-dlp and with that is a GUI called media-downloader. Have seen good success with it and it’s open source, downside is that it’s not super intuitive until you do it a few times. Just posting in case it’s worth adding to your list. Cheers.