Twitter just made it harder to download videos hosted on their site: "Grabbing URLs from Twitter not working. I assume due to their new crack-down on web scrapers?" ~ I wonder if youtube-dl and similar downloaders will find a work-around.

submitted by In-the-clouds from (github.com)

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[–]Drewski 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

youtube-dl and yt-dlp have the ability to pass cookies from Youtube, I imagine the same could be done for Twitter.

[–]In-the-clouds[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This was a good tip and it works! Here is an example for anyone else who might want to download Twitter videos:

yt-dlp.exe --id --cookies-from-browser firefox https://twitter.com/Everything65687/status/1670842365966270469

But drawbacks from Twitter's recent changes still exist:

  • Account required
  • No anonymous downloads
  • When rate limit is met for the current day, downloads might be interrupted

/u/package

[–]package 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

This is literally just a bug report saying that the known procedure for extracting video urls from twitter urls no longer works. This does not mean that the process is harder -- only that it changed.

[–]In-the-clouds[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

If you know of a tool that will allow the download of Twitter videos for free without logging into Twitter, it would be helpful for us if you would post that here. Currently I have no working method to download Twitter videos. So it is harder for me to download Twitter videos. But I hope a fix will be found.

[–]KyleIsThisTall 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

https://www.savetweetvid.com/

[–]In-the-clouds[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing that link. It worked fast for the first link I fed to it. But the next link failed to download. The download service may have hit Twitter's rate limit. Here is the video link I was trying to download:

https://twitter.com/HarrellCattle/status/1674881918079303680

[–]In-the-clouds[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Here is another useful link and could serve as a backup tool for you:

https://twittervideodownloader.com/

[–]package 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Don't have time to look into this too deeply right now, but you can point youtube-dl/yt-dlp to the m3u8 file directly, which can be derived from the twitter URL.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I don't have a Twitter account so I can't test it right now, but if you use Firefox as your browser, you should be able to use the Page Info menu to see all the media on the page, find the video, and save it to disk.

Other browsers will also have some sort of "Developer Tools" menu that will probably let you save the video, although much less conveniently.