How To Download Videos From Any Website

We all g through a lot of different videos every day on social media platforms, youtube and many other websites have uploaded different types of content. Sometimes we want to save some of the videos for later, or simply if we could download and keep it on our device forever offline. Unfortunately, hardly there is any website that provides any downloadable video which we can keep, most of them just allow us to stream. In fact, Youtube does give us the option to download some of its videos but they have their own limitations. But this isn’t the end, in this article, we will discuss how we can download videos from any website and store it on our device from where we can watch them anytime we want or share them with others as well.

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Download Online Videos Using a Web Downloader (Mac, PC, Android, iPhone)

A web downloader is basically a website that provides you with a downloadable link for the videos which you wanted to download. There are a lot of different web downloader apps across the different platforms that work very well. There are some web downloader apps that are also built-in for social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and more. You can simply search for a web downloader online for the same.

How To Download Videos From Any Website
How To Download Videos From Any Website

9xBuddy The most famous and reliable web downloader is the 9xBuddy, it can download almost any kind of embedded videos from any website or social media platform. Using the 9xbuddy web app is very simple and easy, follow the tutorial below to know the working of 9xbuddy pp.

  1. First of all, copy the URL of the video that you want to download.
  2. Now, open the 9xBuddy website and then simply paste the URL in the space provided.
  3. After pasting the link, you will see a download button will appear, click on it and then the app will analyze the URL and will give you options accordingly like the quality of the video, or if there are multiple versions of the video then it will detect and provide the downloadable links for each of the video.
  4. Click on the Download button beside each link that 9xbuddy provides after analyzing and then you wait till the download finishes.

The video will open in your browser itself, thus you can download it from there.

There are some bugs with the website, so if by chance after clicking the download window, if it gets stuck on the Download launchpad pop up, simply click outside the popup and then click on the download button again. Then wait for a while and it should open the video.

Now, click on the three dots located at the bottom right corner of the video frame, and then select the option that says download, if you are on iOS devices then you need to press and hold until you see the contextual options, from that select the option that says save the video or download the linked file. 9xBuddy is also available as a 9xbuddy extension of the browser as well as an Android app.

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How To Download Videos From Any Website

Download Online Videos using Video Downloader Apps (Mac, PC, Android, iPhone)

The best and the easiest method through which you can download a video from a website is by using a video downloader app. There are umpteen video downloader apps available across the different platforms from which you can choose. These video downloader apps are very easy to use and get the job done instantly. All you have to do is just provide the link to that video and it will do the rest.

if you are using Windows PC, then Internet Download manager (IDM) is one of the most famous downloaders of all time. You can use it to download videos as well. For Mac users, there are different video downloader apps available like video hunter, Cisdem video grabber, and more. With the help of these video downloader apps, you can download videos from streaming websites directly.

If you are an Android user the variety just explains even further, for starters we already told you there’s an app for 9xBuddy, then the same developer has also provided with an app called offMP4 which is a very good app to download videos on Android devices.

So this was one of the easiest methods through which you can download videos on your device. If you are still not satisfied with the methods provided you can read along for more different methods of downloading videos from any website.

Download Online videos Using video downloader extensions for browsers like Chrome, Firefox

Most of us use different browsers to surf the internet and watch videos and other contents. So naturally, something embedded with browsers that would help in downloading the video would be very much helpful. So here is an extension for Chrome and Firefox through which you can download the videos which are embedded. Since it is working for chrome then it will definitely work for other chromium-based browsers like Microsoft Edge and others.

Video Downloader Professional- is an extension that just does the job done in an easy manner. It is available for both chrome and firefox and it lets you save the videos offline from a wide variety of different websites.

Download Videos using View Source or Inspect Element (Web browser on Mac or PC)

This alternative method of downloading embedded videos from a website can be a bit complex but surely gets the work done. So if you are able to play any video on a website that is embedded, but you cannot download it, you can try to look for the video source in the HTML code of that particular webpage. So if you are using google chrome or any other Chromium-based browser press the Ctrl + U on Windows and for Mac users press the Command + option + U button from the keyboard to access the HTML code of any website.

Alternatively, you can bring up the developer’s tools of the browser and then go to the inspect element panel. To open the developer’s tools press  Cmd+Shift+C (on Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+C (on Windows). Here you can search for keywords like src, video, MP4 until you see the source code of the embedded video. Most of the time a video source should look something like this-

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<video ... type="video/mp4" src="https://example.com/v/B81005559_442280989773541_6115632323432878793476_n.mp4?_xxx&xxx&xxx" ... </video>

Simply copy the entire src attribute and paste it in a new tab and then hit enter. The video stream should open directly and start playing the video, from here you can directly save the video by right-clicking on it and then clicking on saving or download.

However, sometimes it’s not that easy to download any video from a website as you might not be able to find the direct link of the video through which you can download it. As many developers use a different src attribute for instance in the below code we can see the use of a blob. if you use an src attribute to copy and paste it to a new tab to download the video which has a blob then nothing will happen and you won’t be able to download the video, even if you remove the blob part from the source attribute.

<video ... src="blob:https://example.com/fe146f09-ae4e-4c06-b1b1-eda8b7280256" ... </video>

So to download such types of embedded video we first need to understand what is a blob and how to deal with blob attributes.

What is a Blob?

A Blob is a container object which is usually used to store large object. It helps in storing large chunks of binary data as a single entry in a database.

As it is a binary entry and stores in a single database then the size of a blob has no limit and can contain almost any kind of data. Since we are trying to download videos, so inside a blob our video is stored which we want to download. So let’s proceed further with a tutorial on how to get the videos from the web which are inside a blob.

How To Download Videos From Any Website

At first, we tried a couple of different browser extensions that claimed to download videos from the Blob. however, they were very inconsistent and didn’t provide the result that was expected. So we would say to avoid using such extensions to download any videos from the web which is using blob.

While, on the other hand, the earlier mentioned in this article 9xbuddy is one of the best video downloaders, was able to catch almost all kinds of embedded videos including the ones that have blobs. The only website where 9xbuddy failed was Twitter.

but, if you are interested in downloading a video from a blob URL, or if the video downloader fails to download any video then below we have a manual process through which you can download the video from a website.

  1. Open the developer’s tools on a chrome browser using Cmd+Shift+C (on Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+C (on Windows) and then go to the Network tab.
  2. Return to the original browser window, open the web page that has the embedded video which you want to download, go ahead and start playing that video.
  3. now, switch to the developer’s tools again, press  Cmd+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (Windows) and then search for m3u8.
  4. After your computer is finished searching and has shown the search results, scroll down and find the last occurrence of m3u8 usually it is before the .ts or .m4s segments inside the search panel and then click on the URL label under it.
  5. Finally, on the right side, click on the header tab. Now, inside the general, there should be an option that says Request URL. Go ahead and copy the whole URL.

The URL should end with either .mp4 or m3u8. If the URL ends with .mp4, go ahead and paste the URL in your preferred video downloader. Now wait for the download to finish and you will be able to save the file on your device locally.

How to Convert .m3u8 to .mp4

So if the URL for which you have to download the video ends with .m3u8, then it simply points out that the playlist file that usually contains the video is broken into multiple parts of .ts or .m4s files. Each file is a few KB in size. So we need something which can combine each file together and make it one whole proper video file in a proper video format.

So the best and most reliable method to do so is by using the very famous VLC media player. Download and install the VLC media player on your computer and then open it and follow the steps below.

  1. Open VLC media player, then click on the file menu and then choose a network.
  2. Now, inside the popup window that appears, paste the m3u8 URL which you have copied from step 5 in the aforementioned method.
  3. Check on the Stream Output option and then click settings. Another popup should appear on top.
  4. here you have to choose MPEG 4 format as the encapsulation method, and then click on browse adjacent to the file option and then select save location for your output file.
  5. Finally, type the name of the file by which you want to save it and then click on save. Click on OK to have your output preferences and the rest of the process will be handled by the VLC media player just hang tight until it completes the stitching of your video.

it will take some time but after that VLC media player will parse the URL and stream through the video, while at the same time it will be saving the video at the location which we have set. After the process is completed, the video should be saved at the location which you have set.

To Conclude

So these were some of the best and most reliable methods through which you can download and save videos from a website where videos are embedded. you can even try these methods to get the videos posted on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook TikTok, and more.

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