Jan 29, 2023

Downloading Zoom video

TLDR: Zoom for years has not allowed bulk download of videos. There is probably a reason, but their official response is 'write your own api'


I'll look for github, but now now I wanted to see how far I'd get on my own.

1) Log into your Dev account, click Create App, and use JWT option.

(turns out that's their verbiage for vanilla access)

2) Expand JWT properties, set time to a week, and copy the JWT token 

3) Go to postman.co, find public collection for zoom and copy it to your workspace.


Create Variable to authenticate 

First time using Postman, so I am not exactly sure what I did to create a variable.

1) Open one of the GET calls. I used LIST USERS

2) access_token will be in Red, and when you paste JWT token here, it'll ask if you want to store it as a variable. I say YES. And things work from then onward.


Can I find recordings?

/meetings is asking for meeting ID. but from reading forums I already know that it's going to be 1 URL at a time lookup, extracting the video, downloading it. AND it seems to have a bug with 1-attendee meetings where API is broken and only supports last 6 months. ugh.

So I took a second to gather assets:

API Documentation next step: https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/zoom-api/methods/#operation/recordingGet

Pulled down export of all of my videos:pulls down CSV.

Validate a setting I saw on support boards: you need to remove the passcode requirement first. Settings > Recordings > Require passcode to access shared cloud recordings: Toggle off. 

And two Gitlab repoes I found while reading:

https://github.com/AnessZurba/zoom-batch-downloader/tree/downloader-v2

https://github.com/hyunbinseo/zoom-rec-dl <- not suitable for my needs.


At this point I will probably read the code, standup a VM, install python and see what happens.


Might continue tomorrow... might even remember to update you