ted_talk_downloader.py

import requests #getting content of the TED Talk page

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup #web scraping

import re #Regular Expression pattern matching

# from urllib.request import urlretrieve #downloading mp4

import sys #for argument parsing

# Exception Handling

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    url = sys.argv[1]
else:
    sys.exit("Error: Please enter the TED Talk URL")

#url = "https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection"

#url = "https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity"

r = requests.get(url)

print("Download about to start")

soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, features="lxml")

for val in soup.findAll("script"):
    if(re.search("talkPage.init",str(val))) is not None:
        result = str(val)

result_mp4 = re.search("(?P<url>https?://[^\s]+)(mp4)", result).group("url")

mp4_url = result_mp4.split('"')[0]

print("Downloading video from ..... " + mp4_url)

file_name = mp4_url.split("/")[len(mp4_url.split("/"))-1].split('?')[0]

print("Storing video in ..... " + file_name)


r = requests.get(mp4_url)

with open(file_name,'wb') as f:
  f.write(r.content)

# Alternate method
#urlretrieve(mp4_url,file_name)

print("Download Process finished")