How to download videos from Coursera with curl?

Question

Downloading videos from Coursera is not as easy as copy and pasting the link in terminal. I also have tried exporting cookies from my browser in cookie.txt file and doing a:

curl --cookie cookie.txt "https://class.coursera.org/comnetworks-2012-001/lecture/download.mp4?lecture_id=37"

as suggested in this question but that produces a file named download.mp4?lecture_id=37 with nothing in it.

Can somebody tell me how can I download those video lectures? because downloading them with browser is a risk (I have a slow connection and if by chance if some error occurs my too much time is wasted in re-downloading it).

Answer 1

The Server responds with the status code 302 that is the requested URI moved temporarily.

If you look into the header of the http-response with

curl -i --cookie cookie.txt <URL>

and there is a valid location given, curl doesn't redo the request for this new location by default. To get curl doing this, you have to add the -L switch to the command line.

So

curl -L --cookie cookie.txt <URL>

should do the job.

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Just a note: If you had used wget instead of curl you wouldn't have faced what you've described.