Simple Vimeo Downloader Extension
Links
Motivation
One day my wife need to download some videos from Vimeo to show them to our kid on the way when we mainly offline.
After investigating of different possibility to do this, I stopped on chrome extension as the method to do it. But after trying to find some robust extensions in Chrome Web Store I was disappointed by their quality. Some of the extensions don't work at all. Some want money without allowing me even to try them.
At that time, I was just starting to study JavaScript, so the decision was obvious — write own chrome extension 😁.
Сoncept & Naming
The main idea was to make this extension as simple as possible with minimal resource consumption and permissions required. From such concept, the extension naming was born fluently — Simple Vimeo Downloader.
Developing
The developing process was pretty straightforward. Read Learn Extension Basics and Start Development documentation sections. Run several Sample Extensions with API which I tend to use. And at the end selectively read some topics in Publish and Distribute documentation section.
The challenge was to find the correct way to download video from Vimeo. After some investigation I stopped on two technics:
- make requested to player API
- parse script text of the embedded player
More details you can get from extension source code.
As a result, developing took me the one weekend, and then yet several hours during the week to publish my extension to the Chrome Web Store.
Issues
From time to time Vimeo developers change its markup and as result extension stop working (because it couldn't find where to add its buttons). But from my expertise, it is accidental changes, because after one-two days they usually reverted 😜.
Versions
1.2
- add the ability to download subtitles in the same way as video
1.1
- set proper download file name (based on the video title and chosen properties) in Save dialog
1.0
- initial release with core functionality