This project automates downloading videos from AWS events such as reinvent. There is nothing too specific to downloading AWS videos however, so this can easily be adapted to download vidos from other sources.

This program relies on having access to youtube-dl on the command line. It has been tested using version 2021.06.06 on Windows installed using Chocolatey. The files in the /data directory serve as examples.

In order to view AWS Events on demand videos you must be authenticated. To provide authentication for this program you must log in so that you can view the videos in a browser, and then export the browsers cookies to a file in the netscape cookie format. There are browser extensions which allow you to do this such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookies-txt/ for Firefox.

For AWS Reinvent 2021, the browser URLs worked just fine with youtube-dl downloader, just copy from the URL bar and paste into the CSV.

For the AWS Innovate AI/ML event in 2022, youtube-dl could no longer download directly from the URLs in the browser. Instead you must get the URLs that are returned from the kaltura (a video service) play manifest endpoint. here is an example URL and it's response:

GET https://www.kaltura.com/p/4374333/sp/437433300/playManifest/entryId/1_bp996ar0/protocol/https/format/applehttp/flavorIds/1_zfrisnxw,1_5jx7oiuf,1_esvgi0fm,1_8wdc3xh5,1_re6rleqs,1_7vmgv1ex,1_jipqqije/ks/...etc

RESPONSE:
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=158998,RESOLUTION=426x240
https://play.virtual.awsevents.com/scf/hls/p/4374333/sp/437433300/serveFlavor/entryId/1_bp996ar0/v/31/ev/32/flavorId/1_zfrisnxw/name/a.mp4/index.m3u8...etc
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=263625,RESOLUTION=640x360
https://play.virtual.awsevents.com/scf/hls/p/4374333/sp/437433300/serveFlavor/entryId/1_bp996ar0/v/31/ev/32/flavorId/1_5jx7oiuf/name/a.mp4/index.m3u8...etc
...etc

Notice that this gives a URL for each quality option. The easiest way to do this is as follows:

1. Open Firefox > developer tools > network tab
2. enter "playManifest" into the search
3. Navigate to the video you wish to download
4. You'll see a new request for "playManifest" data appear in the network tab, click to see the response value
5. Copy the URL for the resolution you wish to download.

This whole process could be automated, but I haven't bothered to do this yet.

To build and execute this program, use the dotnet run command, place program arguments after -- to separate arguments for dotnet and for this program.

dotnet run -- --help

dotnet run -- -c 10 C:\Users\gian\Documents\workspace\aws_downloader\data\URLs.csv C:\Users\gian\Documents\workspace\aws_downloader\data\auth_cookies.txt C:\Users\gian\Documents\workspace\aws_downloader\output