Short answer: to download videos from a text file of URLs, keep one address per line, let the tool queue them sequentially, and treat verification as part of the job rather than a follow-up. The things that make large batches fail quietly are not exotic: expired addresses, unbounded parallelism, a destination folder that a sync client is fighting, and no record of what succeeded.
Prepare the list
One page address per line
Use the address of the page that plays the video, not a captured media link. Media addresses expire; page addresses do not (they lead to fresh ones). Add a comment header if the format allows it, recording where the list came from and when.
Group by destination
A flat list of 200 URLs is fine; a flat folder of 200 videos is not. Decide the layout before starting — by course, by domain, by project — and let the queue write into it. Organize video downloads by domain works best as a filename prefix, since the same clip can arrive from several domains.
Set the destination once
Choose the folder deliberately: choose a default download folder for videos means a path you control, outside any sync library. External drives and NAS shares work, with two cautions — a network mount that sleeps mid-batch looks exactly like a broken tool, and SMB/NFS latency dominates throughput for many small files.
How the queue should behave
- Sequential, not parallel. Download multiple videos sequentially is the right instinct: one steady task per item beats twenty competing ones, which mostly buys throttling. Progress, speed and byte counts per task are what make a long run readable.
- Pause and resume. Pause and resume website video downloads only works honestly if the tool re-resolves addresses after a pause — otherwise the resumed request carries a stale signature and fails.
- Retry with a fresh look. Automatically retry failed video downloads should mean re-analysis then retry, with a bounded number of attempts. Tight loops against an authorisation endpoint get you blocked, converting a hiccup into an outage.
- Defer, don’t forget. Save video URLs and download them later is fine as a task list; it is not fine as a set of saved media addresses.
- Select, don’t take everything. Download only selected videos from a webpage needs the analysis step to list items so you can tick the ones you want — see working across tabs.
VidBrowser’s queue is this shape: tasks line up, each keeps its own progress, speed and byte count, and the app works through them in order — a local desktop queue rather than a cloud job queue, which also means nothing waits on someone else's server. The local-first reasoning is on the safety page.
Verify the batch, don’t trust it
| Check | Command or method | Catches |
|---|---|---|
| Count | expected vs files on disk | Silent skips |
| Size floor | flag anything under ~1 MB | Error pages and stubs saved as video |
| Duration | ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of csv=p=0 f.mp4 | Truncated files |
| Audio present | same probe, stream type list | Video-only fetches |
| Duplicates | shasum -a 256 * | The same clip from several sources (avoid duplicate video downloads) |
Ten minutes of this after a 200-item run is cheaper than discovering a third of the batch is stubs next week. It is also the point where download large video files reliably is actually decided — not by a bigger retry count, but by checking each file exists, is long enough, and has sound.
Names, metadata and what to keep
- Keep original filenames when downloading videos only makes sense if the source names are meaningful. Generated slugs are not; prefer topic-date-detail, and rename video files after download in one pass once the batch verifies.
- Download video metadata with the video file: source URL, title, publish date, retrieval date, and the rendition you took. A plain-text sidecar per file survives every tool change; a database inside one app does not.
- Check video resolution before downloading and preview detected video streams before downloading are the same discipline: read the list, note the rungs, and skip anything that would fill a disk for a version you would not watch. See choosing quality.
Where big batches go wrong
- Midnight expiry. Long runs cross signature windows. Fix: re-resolve per item at fetch time, not once at queue time.
- Sleep and disk. The two silent killers of multi-hour jobs: power settings and a USB drive that spins down. Keep the machine awake; watch free space before a 40 GB plan.
- Slow shares. NAS paths are excellent storage and poor download targets for hundreds of small parts; write locally, then move.
- Optical illusions. A progress bar at 99% per item measures bytes, not finished files — why that lies.
FAQ
Can I download videos from a text file of URLs?
Yes — one page address per line, queued sequentially, with per-task progress. Keep the list of addresses perishable by re-resolving at fetch time.
Is sequential better than parallel downloading?
For browser-delivered video, usually yes: parallelism mostly triggers throttling, and one visible failure is easier to fix than twenty interleaved ones.
How do I pause and resume a long queue?
Pause is safe only if the tool re-resolves each address when it restarts, since signed links expire while paused.
Should I download straight to a NAS?
Write to a local folder and move afterwards. Network latency on many small segments makes the direct-to-NAS route slower and harder to verify.
How do I know a batch actually succeeded?
Count files, flag anything tiny, and probe duration and audio streams. A queue that finished is not evidence; ffprobe output is.
Can I keep original filenames?
Only if the source names mean something. Otherwise apply your own scheme once, in one pass, after verification.