Downloading LinkedIn Videos with yt-dlp

Welcome back to our journey in video scraping! In previous lessons, you've learned how to transcribe videos using gpt-4o-transcribe and PyDub, as well as download videos from public Google Drive links. In this lesson, we'll take things further by downloading videos from LinkedIn using yt-dlp. This browser-based tool simplifies accessing video content across multiple platforms.

In this lesson, you will:

• Identify and validate a range of LinkedIn URLs.
• Discover how yt-dlp facilitates downloading from LinkedIn.
• Manage temporary files and address potential legal concerns when downloading videos.

Our objective is to leverage yt-dlp, which was initially designed for YouTube but is flexible enough for use with LinkedIn. The key is recognizing valid LinkedIn URLs and downloading videos efficiently.

LinkedIn URLs can be in formats such as:

• Full length: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:VIDEO_ID
• Post based: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/USERNAME_activity-VIDEO_ID

Understanding these structures is crucial for initiating the download process.

For your own projects, you'll need to install yt-dlp using pip:

# Install the yt-dlp package for downloading videos from various platforms
pip install yt-dlp

Note that yt-dlp is already pre-installed in the CodeSignal environment, so you can use it directly in the practice exercises without any additional setup.

We'll start by verifying whether a URL belongs to LinkedIn:

# Import URL parsing utility to break down and analyze URLs
from urllib.parse import urlparse

class LinkedInService:
    @staticmethod
    def is_linkedin_url(url):
        # Parse the URL to extract its components (domain, path, etc.)
        parsed = urlparse(url)
        
        # Define the valid URL path patterns that contain LinkedIn videos
        valid_paths = [
            '/feed/update/urn:li:activity:',  # Existing format
            '/posts/'  # New format to support
        ]
        
        # Check if URL is from LinkedIn domain and contains a valid video path
        return 'linkedin.com' in parsed.netloc and any(path in parsed.path for path in valid_paths)

This function checks for linkedin.com in the URL's net location and confirms whether a recognizable path is present, ensuring accurate URL validation.

The urlparse() function breaks down the URL into components like netloc (network location/domain) and path (the part after the domain). The parsed.netloc contains the domain portion, while parsed.path contains the URL path. The any() function returns True if at least one of the valid path patterns is found in the URL path.