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Last active November 30, 2023 17:15
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Download CSPAN videos/clips to MP4 with YouTube-DL
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download-cspan-videos-clips-to-mp4-with-youtube-dl.md

How to download CSPAN clips to MP4 in Windows with YouTube-DL

  1. Install Youtube-DL so it's in your path/command line (https://github.com/ytdl-org)

  2. Get Two URLs ready to copy/paste. Both the URL of the CSPAN page w/the video and the M3U8 URL of the video. Get the M3U8 by viewing the page source and looking for ".m3u8". Examples (page): https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4990755/user-clip-johnson-covid-response (m3u8): https://m3u8-1.c-spanvideo.org/clip/clip.4954874.m3u8

  3. Run the line below in a Windows command prompt. Make sure to first replace the #M3U8_URL# and #CSPAN_VIDEO_PAGE_URL# with your URLs from step #2

youtube-dl #M3U8_URL# --referer #CSPAN_VIDEO_PAGE_URL# --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.117 Safari/537.36"

Notes/Unknown:

  • May have use Google Chrome to get the M3U8 URL? (TBD)
  • Only tested on a CSPAN "clip". May work on full videos but they are normally VERY LONG (5-10 hours) so you may want to stick to shorter clips you or someone else has made.

Reference

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