Introduction

If anyone uses Zoom to record or Panopto to host recordings and later wants to access the recordings, here’s a simple linux bash script to download the video file and acompanying subtitles. For a while I used zoomdl, but it is no longer under active development, and I began running into various issues about a year ago. I stumbled upon yt-dlp and found it under active development and quite extensive.

This tutorial requires you to have a “cookies” text file, which needs to contain the cookies export in the Netscape HTTP format of the Zoom cookies after logging in.

Install cookie editor

Install the cookie editor extension. I personnally use it with Microsoft Edge, but there are similar extensions for Chrome, Firefox, etc.

Modify export format

Change the preferred cookie export format to Netscape HTTP Cookie File in the extension options. It is necessary to export in this format, otherwise yt-dlp will not be able to read the cookies.txt file correctly.

Log in to Zoom or Panopto

Log in to Zoom or Panopto in your browser. Be sure to remain logged in while exporting the cookies.

Export cookies

The export button is at the top fo the window. It copies the cookies to your clipboard, which then need to be pasted into a text file (I have my saved as cookies.txt), which yt-dlp will then read when it executes.

Install yt-dlp

In Arch Linux, yt-dlp can be found with:

$ yay yt-dlp

Or:

$ sudo pacman -Sy yt-dlp

Create bash script for Zoom

Save the following code to a text file (my bash script file name is yt-dlp-zoom.sh):

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#!/bin/bash
echo What is the link?

read link

yt-dlp --referer "https://zoom.us/" --cookies /path/to/cookies/file/cookies_zoom.txt -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" --write-subs $link

Create bash script for Panopto

Save the following code to a text file (my bash script file name is yt-dlp-panopto.sh):

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#!/bin/bash
echo What is the link?

read link

yt-dlp --cookies /path/to/cookies/file/cookies_panopto.txt -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" --write-subs $link

Change permissions

Modify the permissions of the bash scripts to allow execution:

$ chmod +x yt-dlp-zoom.sh
$ chmod +x yt-dlp-panopto.sh

Execute the scripts

Execute the bash script with either ./yt-dlp-zoom.sh or ./yt-dlp-panopto.sh, copy and paste the link into the shell prompt for the video that you would like to save, and it should download the video and the subtitles.

References

1. https://ostechnix.com/yt-dlp-tutorial/