Ó hAoḋa

How to Download Videos with No “Download” Button from Canvas

Introduction §

Normally, when videos such as lecture recordings are posted to Canvas, there is a “Download file.mp4” or similar link available on the page, or at the very least you can right-click on the playing video and select “Save media”. Sometimes, however, there is no such link available, which is quite annoying for people like me who want to hoard lecture content. Below is the workaround that I’ve found to work for downloading such videos from Canvas. It’s not quite as streamlined as I would like it to be, so suggestions and/or feedback would be appreciated, but it works for me.

The instructions should be browser and operating system independent, but note that I have only tested them on Arch Linux using qutebrowser & Firefox. The instructions also assume that the file on Canvas is an mp4 file, an assumption that I have not been able to verify the reliability of: I have never encountered a non-mp4 video on Canvas so it’s possible that it stores videos exclusively as mp4 files, but it’s also equally possible that I’ve simply coincidentally only ever encountered mp4 files and that other video formats are supported.

Steps §

1. Open Canvas in your web browser and navigate to the video file that you want to download. Before going any further, I suggest you double-check that there is no download button and that you can’t right-click on the vide and select “Save media” to save yourself the trouble of the following steps.

   

   

2. Open your browser’s Inspector window by right-clicking anywhere on the page and selecting “Inspect” and navigate to the “Network” tab of the Inspector window.

   

3. Enter the term mp4 into the “Filter” box (called “Filter URLs” on Firefox) to only display network results relating to the video itself.

4. Click on the video to start playing it. A number of network requests will be displayed in the Inspector window; we are interested in the last one.

   

5. Right-click on the last result displayed in the Inspector window, and hover the mouse over the “Copy” option in the drop-down menu (labelled “Copy Value” on Firefox). This is where the steps will diverge depending on your operating system. If you are on a UNIX-like system such as GNU/Linux or MacOS, click the “Copy as cURL” option in the sub-menu. If you are on Windows, click the “Copy as PowerShell” option.

   

6. Open a terminal emulator (or PowerShell on a Windows machine) and paste the command you copied into the command prompt. If you are using cURL, append -o file_name.mp4 (or --output file_name.mp4) to the command before hitting return, substituting file_name.mp4 for the name that you wish to give the file. The download directory can be specified by prepending the path to that directory to the file name, otherwise it will default to your home directory.