This script allows you to download all of your lecture recordings from the Echo360 website, without having to manually click on each download button separately.
- Designed to work for New Zealand universities. It should work for educational institutions in other countries, but I haven't been able to test it.
- Downloading is only supported for courses that have the download option enabled. There is an experimental mode that you can use to attempt to bypass this restriction (see below for details), however I would recommend just emailing your lecturer nicely and asking them to enable downloads :)
- Download the script (main.py) and place it in a new directory somewhere. Note that you will need Python installed in order to run the script.
- Log into the Echo360 site using your web browser.
- Use a browser extension to obtain a cookies.txt file. Extensions are available for both Chrome and Firefox. I recommend this one for Firefox. Place this file in the same directory as the script.
- Open a terminal in the directory with the script and cookies.txt file in it.
Run the script with
python3 main.py. - Find the course you want to download the lectures for and copy the URL for the page that lists all the lectures. You can also download a single lecture by copying the URL while on the video page for that lecture.
- Paste the URL into the program and press enter.
- Lectures will be downloaded into the "output" folder.
Note: If at any point you get a 403 Client Error, try downloading the
cookies.txt file again. You can use the --skip option (see below) to restart
where you left off if needed.
python3 main.py [URL] [OPTIONS]...
Note that if a URL is not provided as a command line argument, the user will be prompted to enter one interactively.
The following command line arguments are supported:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
-h / --help |
show a help message and exit |
-x / --experimental-mode |
enable experimental mode (default: off) |
-c FILE / --cookies-file FILE |
path to cookies file to load cookies from (default: cookies.txt) |
-o PATH / --output-dir PATH |
directory to store downloaded lessons in (default: output) |
--skip NUMBER |
number of lessons to skip when downloading multiple lessons |
There is a new experimental mode that attempts to download lectures, even if
the download option hasn't been enabled (no download button in the user
interface). To enable this mode you must pass the '-x' command line option to
the script when you run it, eg. python3 main.py -x. Note that you will need
to have yt-dlp and
ffmpeg installed for this to work. If you get 403
errors, it is probably an issue with your cookies file. Try clicking into a
video first and then creating a cookies.txt file, or logging out and back in.
If you find any issues with this script or the Echo360 website updates and causes the script to break, create an issue on the issue tracker and I'll do my best to resolve it.