From there, all I needed to do was to download the file.

Because Puppeteer allows you to listen for the network requests, all I had to do is look for the request that contained the video file extension, and then echo that out. This little script is requesting an OpenLoad embed link, pressing the play button once, which triggers a network request to the video file’s URL. To solve this issue, I wrote a small script which is using Chromium’s Puppeteer tool for creating headless requests using the Chromium browser. OpenLoad is fetching the source video URL after you press play, so it’s not as easy as fetching the video’s source code and parsing the link, because it doesn’t exist initially, it’s obfuscated into the JS code. The Problemĭevelopers that don’t want other people to be able to easily download their videos usually protect their content by obfuscating the code or loading it over JS. Nevertheless, the process of programmatically (headless) downloading files loaded with VideoJS, as is the case for OpenLoad, is pretty interesting, so I thought I should share my approach.

The files belonged to them, and OpenLoad has an API designed for this, but I didn’t find out about it until it was too late. Someone came up to me recently with the task of downloading a few video files hosted via OpenLoad.

Download video javascript