yt-dlp and Jdownloader2 work most times
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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@fort_burp Check the network panel, not elements. There you should be able to filter for media.
Make sure to have it open befote loading the page.
Also note that some pages might use video files like mp4, some might use playlists, others might use DRM which is not supported by yt-dlp anyway.
Also yt-dlp might work just by using the website URL, it will auto fetch the video from the page.
ind the address of the video that’s currently displayed on the page (to download with wget or yt-dlp)
I think that what you're wanting to actually do isn't use the Firefox developer console, but rather the list of media.
Click on the lock icon in the URL bar. Under that, choose "Connection secure". Under that, "More information". Click on the "media" tab. You'll have a list to the URL of the videos on the page.
For many sites, though, you can just feed the address of the page, not the video embedded in the page, to yt-dlp and it'll go looking and can find the video itself.
EDIT: If you're new to yt-dlp and your URL has characters that bash interprets specially, like "&" or something, be sure to put quotes around the URL to avoid that.
E.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOUY5H6b6N0&t=30s
Should be:
$ yt-dlp 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOUY5H6b6N0&t=30s'yt-dlp video_url if the site is supported by yt-dlp.
If the site is not supported, F12 only works sometimes. Many sites use some form of encryption or obfuscation to try to prevent you from downloading.
I've had good luck with Xtreme download manager. It's FOSS, and has a browser extension that automatically detects videos and gives you the option to download them.
Different mechanisms.
If it's YT (or a yt embed) just use yt-dlp. Same goes for many, many other sites. Other comments describe how to do that.
If not, try what @danielsiepmann@friendica.daniel-siepmann.de recommends. However, sites use all sorts of tricks like providing the video in chunks, or hiding the actual video URL behind so much javascript that a human just can't get at it, or requiring authentication etc.