Skip to content

Downloading Udemy Courses

In this article I am going to show you how you can download any Udemy course you have in your account. Currently when you try to download the 1080p videos from Udemy site, I will download the 720p version. And also you have to go and download on each lecture, which seems like overkill.

Why I need to download them? Because from COVID pandemic most IT related office employees are working from home. I am one of them. So why I will stay in a big Bhartiya city? So, I went to my home town which is ruler area. In my home town internet is limited, currently 4 GB per day plan with not very good speed, but enough for working remotely on office PC and attend Skype/Teams calls. So, I came back to big city and thought why not download all those courses so that I don’t have to use my limited internet connection in my home town. But Udemy not allows to download all lectures in one shot and also with not 1080p quality. On mobile it works, but I want that on my laptop.

So, I searched for a way to download it and found a tool called ‘youtube-dl’. From name it seems like it is for downloading the YouTube videos, but I have not tried it, all I know it works for Udemy. Here I will show you how you can use this tool in case you want it.

I am using windows system. You can down load this tool from here and then extract it to any location of your choice on your hard disk. Then go inside your extracted location and open command line there (tip: you can write cmd in the explorer address bar and it will open command line using that location).

First you need the cookie from Udemy and convert it to TXT file, so that you can pass credentials and toll can download your owned courses. To make this process simple, there is a chrome extension which you can download from here (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt/bgaddhkoddajcdgocldbbfleckgcbcid). After installing this extension, open udemy and click on this extension and click on the export button. It will download a .txt file. Copy or move it to your extracted location, as we will need access of it. I am assuming name of your cookie TXT file is udemy.com_cookies.txt.

Then back to command line, there you can write this command:

youtube-dl.exe -o "%(playlist)s/%(chapter_number)s - %(chapter)s/%(playlist_index)s. %(title)s.%(ext)s" --cookies .\udemy.com_cookies.txt https://www.udemy.com/<your-course-name>/

Make sure you write the –o flag value in double quotes as shown above, otherwise it will give weird error message. You will need to replace <your-course-name> with your course name. Make sure you copy it from browser address bar. Currently Udemy courses have this address format:  https://www.udemy.com/course/<your-course-name>/ , but you need to enter https://www.udemy.com/<your-course-name>/ format in the command.

It will start downloading the course with section and lecture names. In case your downloading stops you can close the command line window and then open it again and resume your download using this command:

youtube-dl.exe -o "%(playlist)s/%(chapter_number)s - %(chapter)s/%(playlist_index)s. %(title)s.%(ext)s" --cookies .\udemy.com_cookies.txt --playlist-start 5 https://www.udemy.com/<your-course-name>/ 

Here –playlist-start flag sets from which part you want to resume the download. For example, here I have instructed to start download from lecture number 5.

So, this way you can easily download Udemy course that you own. let me know in comments if you face any issue or if you have better suggestion on this.

One Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.