How to download videolectures.net videos with VLC

videolectures.net has very good content but, no good way to download the videos(at least as of now).

And oftentimes you want to watch them offline, so here’s a way to dowload them if you have VLC video player installed.

This of course works for all videos that are streamed from an mms:// address and not only the videolectures ones.

Btw, found same idea, but using mplayer instead, from bradfordcross here.

How to

Find the mms:// address for the video(from the web page source) and do:

$ /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I rc mms://velblod2.ijs.si:80/2009/pascal2/mlss09uk_cambridge/mackay_it/mlss09uk_mackay_it_01.wmv --sout ~/Desktop/information-theory.avi

If you are not on a Mac, then you need to update the paths.

Make a bash script from it

Its annoying to write all of the above every time you want to download a video, so is worth to make a bash script from it.

Create a new file, with content:

# getvideo.sh 
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I rc $1 --sout ~/Desktop/$2.avi vlc://quit;

Note that i added the vlc://quit; at the end, this will make it the script exit when finished.

Make it executable and reachable from everywhere:

$ chmod 711 getvideo.sh 
$ ln -s getvideo.sh /usr/bin/getvideo

And use like so:

$ getvideo mms://velblod2.ijs.si:80/2009/pascal2/mlss09uk_cambridge/mackay_it/mlss09uk_mackay_it_01.wmv information-theory