Okay, so I was messing around online the other day, right? And I stumbled upon this video using JW Player. You know, that embedded video player that’s everywhere. I wanted to download it – just for offline viewing, of course! – and it turned out to be a bit of a rabbit hole.
First off, I tried the obvious stuff. Right-click? Nope. Any download button? Nada. JW Player isn’t exactly broadcasting, “Hey, download me!” So, I figured I’d have to get a little craftier.
I started by inspecting the page source. Now, I’m no coding wizard, but I know my way around a bit of HTML. I hit F12, opened up the developer tools, and started digging. I was looking for anything that looked like a video URL, something ending in .mp4 or .m3u8, or even just any reference to “JW Player” and its settings.
This is where it got a little tricky.
I saw a bunch of JavaScript files loading. JW Player usually relies on a config file or script to tell it what video to play. So, I started looking through those. I was hoping to find a URL pointing directly to the video file. Some of them were minified, making it hard to read, but I kept at it.
After a while, I managed to find a script that contained the video URL. It was hidden in a JSON object, inside a parameter that looked like it was for setting up the player. Bingo!
Here’s the breakdown of what I did:
- Opened the webpage with the JW Player video.
- Opened the browser’s developer tools (usually by pressing F12).
- Went to the “Network” tab in the developer tools.
- Reloaded the page (Ctrl+R or Cmd+R) to capture all the network requests.
- Filtered the requests by “Media” to easily find video files, or filtered by “JS” to find the javascript files.
- Looked through the requests for any files related to JW Player (often named something like “*” or “*”).
- Opened the relevant javascript file and searched for video extensions such as “.mp4”, “.m3u8”.
- Once found, copy the link.
With the video URL in hand, I used a download manager to grab the video. There are tons of them out there. I just pasted the URL into the download manager, and it started downloading. Simple as that!
It’s important to remember to respect copyright and only download videos for personal use. This was just a fun little experiment, and I learned a bit about how JW Player works under the hood.
So yeah, that’s how I downloaded a JW Player video. It took a bit of poking around, but it was definitely doable. Hope this helps someone else out there!
