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twitter-video-dl

how it looks

Features

  • Download any twitter video to a local mp4 file
  • Doesn't communicate with any server
  • Works for private tweets

Install

Until this is on the Chrome store, you'll need to download the extension from github and installed it unpacked:

  1. Download the extension (as a zip file + unpack, or via git clone [email protected]:jdb8/twitter-video-dl-extension.git)
  2. cd twitter-video-dl-extension && yarn build. This should create a build folder
  3. Visit chrome://extensions (via omnibox or menu -> Tools -> Extensions)
  4. Enable Developer mode by ticking the checkbox in the upper-right corner
  5. Click on the "Load unpacked extension..." button
  6. Select the build directory that was generated earlier

Unfortunately Google seems to have disabled the ability to install local .crx files, so this is the only way to install it before it's on the store.

Usage

Once installed, you should be able to right-click on any Twitter video and see a 'Download video' link. Clicking it should download the video as an mp4.

Why

I couldn't find any existing extensions/user scripts that would allow me to download Twitter videos entirely client-side. Most existing services appear to use the Twitter API on the backend, and request your tweet remotely to grab the raw video files. This wasn't really suitable for downloading tweets from private accounts or when just generally wanting to avoid giving a random third-party info about what videos I'm viewing.

This extension doesn't require a Twitter API key as it uses the data that your browser already downloaded in order to play the video, powered by the wasm port of ffmpeg to transcode in the background. Think of it as an alternate user-agent to let you watch videos in a potentially more accessible way without compromising your privacy.

Native libraries such as youtube-dl (and ffmpeg as used here in wasm form) can achieve the same purpose, but don't offer the convenience of right-clicking a video in the browser to download. If you don't care about that convenience, you might want to check out those alternatives.

Troubleshooting

There might be a bunch of bugs right now, so if you run into problems the following steps are suggested:

  • Try refreshing the page
  • If that doesn't work, try reloading the extension in chrome://extensions
  • If you still get problems, please file an issue with any console output from the background view (inspect-able from chrome://extensions) as well as the console of the page you're viewing on Twitter