First off, thank you everybody for all of the interest in this project. I originally wrote it to solve a one-time problem and it clearly has had a lot of interest beyond solving my problem. However, due to a number of circumstances, as you probably have noticed with my lack of updates I am no longer able to maintain this project. The venerable youtube-dl supports Twitter video downloading, so please check them out.

Again, thank you so much for the interest in this project. I will keep this repo up for historical reference but will no longer respond to bug reports or messages.

A simple, approach to downloading videos from Twitter. Twitter presents these video files as streams, so as to make it (un)intentionally difficult to just download videos.

Python3 is a must.

pip install -r requirements.txt.

You will also need ffmpeg. Install for your operating system of choice. If you use the supplied Vagrant box, this will be taken care of for you.

twitter-dl.py [-hdow] VIDEO_URL

-d or --debug: This will enable debugging output. Additional -d flags (up to 2) will increase debugging.

-o or --output: Change the output directory. The default is output/

-w or --target_width: In pixels. Download only the video resolution closest to this value. e.g. -w 500

-h: Help.

Included is a Vagrantfile that will spin up a VM, pre-configured, to run the script. Outside of bugs for my Vagrantfile, no support is offered for vagrant.

Access the box and python will be available at python3.

I like to use python -m http.server, or in this case, python3 -m http.server. I've opened up port 8000 on the box for this purpose.

A directory named output (by default) will be created, with the twitter username, followed by the tweet ID.

From there, the script will attempt to parse out the streams and download them. You'll end up with a new .mp4 file for each resolution found.