ZoomDL

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Goal

Conferences, meetings and presentations held on Zoom are often recorded and stored in the cloud, for a finite amount of time. The host can chose to make them available to download, but it is not mandatory.

Nonetheless, I believe if you can view it, you can download it. This script makes it easy to download any video stored on the Zoom Cloud. You just need to provide a valid zoom record URL, and optionally a filename, and it will download the file.

Availability

The script was developed and tested under GNU/Linux (precisely, Debian 10). Thus, it should work for about any GNU/Linux distro out there, with common settings. You basically only need Python3 in your path.

New from 2020.06.09 There now exists an executable file zoomdl.exe for Windows. It was kinda tested under Windows 10. Because I never coded under Windows, I have very few tests, mostly empirical ones. Expect bugs! If you encounter a Windows-specific error, don't expect much support. If the error is related to the general logic of the program, report it and I'll do my best to fix it.

Installation

Linux/OSX

You need to have a valid Python3 installation. Except from that, just download the script zoomdl (not zoomdl.exe) and run it like a normal binary. If you wish to make it available system-wide, you can copy it to /usr/local/bin/ (or anywhere else available in your PATH). Then you can simply use it wherever you want.

The following two commands make that easy. In a terminal, run:

sudo wget https://github.com/Battleman/zoomdl/releases/latest/download/zoomdl -O /usr/bin/zoomdl
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/zoomdl

You will be prompted to enter your password (your computer password, not zoom). It's likely that you won't see anything as you type it, don't worry, it is normal (even for OSX)

Once you have done that, you can use your terminal and type the commands normally.

Windows

This is still in beta Grab the dedicated binary zoomdl.exe, and launch it using your command line. If you don't know how, visit this wikihow. You may encounter warning from your anti-virus, you can ignore them (I'm not evil, pinky-promise). You probably don't need a Python3 installation, it should be contained within the executable.

Validity of urls

There are 2 type of valid urls.

Those starting with https://zoom.us/rec/play/...
Or, with a domain, https://X.zoom.us/rec/play/... where X is a domain, something like us02web, epfl,... or similar.

If there is a domain in your url, make sure to include it, it's crucial.

Usage

zoomdl [-h] -u/--url 'url' [-f/--fname 'filename'] [-p/--password 'password'] [-c/--count-clips count] [-d/--filename-add-date] [--user-agent 'custom_user_agent]

-u/--url is mandatory, it represents the URL of the video
-f/--fname is optional, it is the name of the resulting file without extension. If nothing is provided, the default name given by Zoom will be used. Extension (.mp4, .mkv,... is automatic)
-p/--password is too optional. Set it when your video has a password.
-c/--count-clips: Sometimes, one URL can contain multiple clips. This tunes the number of clips that will be downloaded. Recordings with multiple clips seem to be quite rare, but do exist. The parameter count works as follow:
- 0 means: download all of them (starting from the current clip)
- 1 means: download only the first/given clip
- > 1 means: download until you reach this number of clip (or the end)
-d/--filename-add-date will append the date of the recording to the filename. without effect if -f is specified
--user-agent (no shorthand notation): lets you specify a custom User-Agent (only do that if you know what you're doing and why)

About syntax

I see a lot of people who don't understand what the above means. Here is a short explanation:

This is a command, with multiple possible parameters.
Parameters usually have a short version (with one dash, like -u) and an equivalent long version (with two dashes, like --url); the short and long version are shown separated by a /; you must only use one of them.
The parameters between square brackets are optional (like -f, that allows you to input a custom filename). The others (for the moment, only -u) are mandatory.
The order of parameters don't matter
the -h parameter only displays a short help and commands explanation

For example, those are all valid commands (ofc by replacing the URLs):

zoomdl -u "https://my_url" -f "recording_from_monday"
zoomdl --url "https://my_url"
zoomdl -p '$28fn2f8' --filename-add-date --filename "recording_from_tuesday" -u "https://my_url" --user-agent "Windows 10 wonderful User-Agent -v 3"

About quotes [IMPORTANT]

The quotes are not mandatory, but if your filename/url/password/... contains reserved characters (\, &, $,%...), quotes are the way to go.

Under Linux/OSX, it is strongly advised to use single quotes, because "4$g3.2" will replace $g3 by nothing, while '4$g3.2' will leave the string as-is.

Under Windows, I think you must use double quotes everywhere. Don't quote me on that.

Requirements

All dependencies are bundled within the executable. This allows to make a standalone execution without need for external libraries.

If you wish to build it yourself, see requirements.txt. The most important requirement is requests. Please see acknowledgements for a note on that.

Acknowledgements

The folder executable contains requests (and its dependencies), an awesome wrapper for HTTP(s) calls. Please check them out!

jkscx / zoomdl