Is it possible to download video from any website?

talveoli wrote:

So I want to ask, is there any way to download videos from any website?

Certainly!

Not long videos, usually just a few seconds of clips are enough, preferably in a clearer MP4 format. Is there any more universal tool or method?

There is no one universal tool. There are a variety of "grey market" tools available.

But there's a little catch. When you do this, it will get your company sued for copyright infringement. Then they will fire you. You should check your employment agreement(s) and/or contracts. A savvy company would include an indemnification clause so that if you did something like this, they could then turn around and sue you for any legal costs they incur.

In short, you're playing with fire.

Some videos cannot be downloaded. Plus, there are copyright issues. As far as MP4s, not all videos online are in MP4 format and would need to be converted. In other words, there's no simple tool do download whatever video you might want.

I certainly agree the copyright issue is huge. There is only a very narrow margin for the "Fair Use" of copyrighted content from others to be used in your own product. Whenever using someone else's copyrighted works, you should always contact the copyright holder to negotiate for your right to use a clip from their copyrighted work.

It would be a good idea to hire a lawyer, especially one who specializes in copyrights & licensing to assist you and to help protect yourself when you do utilize clips from other people's copyrighted works in your own creation.

Everything has a copyright regardless if it is clearly shown online.

Check out what they discussed here, and think the method ParkerSimmons mentioned is worth a try!

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/possible-to-download-video-from-any-website-to-my-computer

If I want to download a video from any website, but I can't find the source file of the video on that website, I will just use Safari + Mac's screen recording function, which is very simple, crude and stable.

The method is: open Safari, find the short video you want, then press Command + Shift + 5, select "Record Selected Area", frame the part of the video, and click to start recording. After the video is finished, click the upper right corner to stop, and the system will automatically save it as a high-quality MP4 file, which is super convenient.

Although this method is "recording", the image quality is actually very good, and it is especially useful for those websites where you can't find the video link no matter what. So if you often want to download video from any website as the opening and ending credits, you can really always have this method, which is a universal emergency!

Sometimes I want to download videos from any website, especially those that are played in .m3u8 streaming format. It is really good to download them using the command line. Although it is a little advanced, it is very efficient once you understand it.

The general method is to first use the browser developer tools to grab the .m3u8 address, and then use the ffmpeg command to do it directly:

bash
ffmpeg -i "https://url/video.m3u8" -c copy output.mp4

As long as the video is not too encrypted, it can be downloaded in a few seconds, and it is directly MP4, and the image quality is well maintained, saving the screen recording and editing. This command line method is really suitable for those friends who often need to download videos from any website. It is stable, time-saving, and does not require the installation of other tools. It is very cool.

If you really want to download videos from any website, I strongly recommend you to try yt-dlp, a command line tool. It is an upgraded version of youtube-dl and supports many websites, not just YouTube, such as Twitter, Bilibili, Pinterest, and many teaching platforms.

For example, if you see a video and want to save it, the command is super simple:

bash
yt-dlp https://video URL

It will automatically help you find the highest-definition video link and download it as MP4. You can also add parameters to control the format, clarity, or even download only the audio. Like this:

bash
yt-dlp -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mp4 https://video URL

The best thing is that it can not only download videos from any website, but also skip ads, skip titles, download subtitles, etc. I found a teaching video on a small website before, the page loaded slowly and I couldn’t save it by right-clicking. I used yt-dlp to get it done with one click.

So, as long as you have a little more hands-on ability, it is really worth learning this tool. If you want to download video from any website, you don't have to worry about it! Anyone who uses it knows it.

Me too here, I like downloading those interesting videos for my personal use. I used to use online downloaders, but they cannot download from some sites, then it became complexe as I have to find different tools to download from different sites, the worse is I have to stand all their ads and unreliability. Now I quit, I use only stable desktop software.

I like the most iFunia YouTube Downloader and Any Video Converter. They both can download from YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest and many more. With ifunia I can even get mp4 videos from niche sites like Odysee, Streamable, Tubi, etc.

But as you'll use those clips in your work, I think you should not ignore the copyright issue, to not have troubles later.