Using Wget for recursive downloads

I discovered the VimCasts website recently and have been watching a few of their videos. Due to my unreliable internet connection, I prefer to download whole video files and then watch them (this also allows watching them on portable devices).

VimCasts allow directory listing on their storage server, which I believe is permission to bulk download their content. The only issue is that each episode is stored in its own subdirectory and in two formats. I don’t want the folder structure and I only want one of the formats.

At first I tried using a couple of different browser extensions that are supposed to automate this, before I realised that Linux command line tools must be able to do this.

The first attempt just used the recursive feature of wget:

wget -r http://media.vimcasts.org/videos/

Unfortunately that also traverses up the directory structure and gets out of control, but that’s fixed with:

wget -r --no-parent http://media.vimcasts.org/videos/

This is better, and we end up with a clone of the subdirectories and their contents. I only want the ogv files, though, which is also possible with wget:

wget -r --no-parent --accept ogv http://media.vimcasts.org/videos/

Finally, I don’t particularly want the folder structure, just the files. That can also be covered with wget’s options, so the final command that does exactly what I want is:

wget -r --no-parent --accept ogv -nd http://media.vimcasts.org/videos/

That goes off and downloads all OGV files in subdirectories, flattening the folder structure and giving very readable output as it does it.

Another joy of using Linux.