Lynda.com Video Downloader

Note: you must have a valid Lynda.com subscription to download paid contents.

A convenient script for downloading and organizing Lynda.com course videos and subtitles in batch.

Usage

1. Make sure you have Python 3.7+ installed and accessible via command line, then install yt-dlp by pip install yt-dlp. If you have both Python 2 and 3 installed in your system, check that you're using the correct pip alias for the target python version (e.g. it could be pip3 for Python 3).

2. Install FFmpeg, and make sure it's accessible via command line. It is required to mux video and audio into one single file when downloading from sites like YouTube (they keep videos and audios with best possible qualities to their separate files). I recommend that you use a package manager to install it. On Windows, you may install Scoop then scoop install ffmpeg; on MacOS, you may install Homebrew then brew install ffmpeg for FFmpeg (More options).

3. (Optional) Set up your credentials. There're two scenarios:

   1. You have your own Lynda.com account:

      Set line 26 of down.py to USE_COOKIES = False, then fill in your username and password in line 37 and 38.

   2. Your Lynda.com account is associated with your organization account, i.e. you sign in with your organization portal:

      2.1. Log into your account using your preferred browser. Supported browsers are listed in the documentation for --cookies-from-browser.

      2.2. Set line 26 of down.py to USE_COOKIES = True. Modify line 34 to instruct yt-dlp to load cookies from the target browser.

4. Put URLs of all courses that you wish to download inside a file named urls.txt and place it in the same directory as down.py. Here I included a sample urls.txt file (FYI the included courses are from the famous Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator One-on-One series by Deke McClelland), but you should remember to clear the file content first if you'd like to download something else.

5. Run the script by ./down.py or python down.py (similar to stated previously, check your python alias if you have both Python 2 and 3 installed on your system). It will download specified courses to the same directory as down.py. Here's a sample download outcome after running the script with the sample URLs:

Lynda.com- Photoshop CC 2018 One-on-One - Fundamentals
├── Introduction
│   ├── 001- Welcome.en.srt
│   ├── 001- Welcome.mp4
│   ├── 002- Updates to the Photoshop CC 2018 interface.en.srt
│   └── 002- Updates to the Photoshop CC 2018 interface.mp4
├── 1. Opening an Image
│   ├── 003- How it all starts.en.srt
│   ├── 003- How it all starts.mp4
│   ├── 004- Opening from the Windows desktop.en.srt
│   ├── 004- Opening from the Windows desktop.mp4
│   ├── ...
├── 2. Getting Around
│   ├── 010- Navigating your image.en.srt
│   ├── 010- Navigating your image.mp4
│   ├── 011- Zooming in and out.en.srt
│   ├── 011- Zooming in and out.mp4
│   ├── 012- Using the more precise Zoom tool.en.srt
│   ├── 012- Using the more precise Zoom tool.mp4
│   ├── ...
├── ...
└── Conclusion
    ├── 177- Until next time.en.srt
    └── 177- Until next time.mp4
Lynda.com- Illustrator CC 2018 One-on-One Fundamentals
├── ...
...

FYI for Windows users, if you're looking for an all-purpose media player that can recognize subtitle languages from file names shown above, I'd suggest Potplayer by Kang Yong-Huee, the original author of the famous KMPlayer.

Notes

2023-09-04: This was originally written for youtube-dl. The script has since been updated to use the more powerful folk yt-dlp.

This is just a wrapper program of the wonderful youtube-dl, a powerful command-line tool that allows you to conveniently download videos, audios, playlists and episodes from many websites. My intention of creating this script is to provide a simple cross-platform wrapper script that can quickly download multiple courses / playlists without going through the entire lengthy documentation (I got you covered there 😉). In fact, with minor or no tweaking, this script can also be reused to download contents from other websites such as courses on Udemy, TV episodes on YouTube or music collections on SoundCloud! All credits go to the contributors behind youtube-dl! 😍