How to Download All My Videos from Vimeo

Ton points to news that Vimeo has layed off most of its staff. 

I wasn’t sure that I had kept local copies of everything I’d uploaded to Vimeo over the years, so I cobbled together a way to download everything from the command line on my Mac. What follows presupposes that you have Homebrew already installed.

First, install both yt-dlp and ffmpeg:

brew install yt-dlp
brew install ffmpeg

Next, make sure that your Terminal app has “full disk access”:

• Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access
• Toggle “Terminal” on.

In Safari, login to Vimeo, and note your username.

Then, from the command line:

yt-dlp \
 --cookies-from-browser safari \
 --merge-output-format mp4 \
 --cookies-from-browser safari \
 --download-archive downloaded.txt \
 -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best \
 https://vimeo.com/USERNAME/videos

(substitute your own Vimeo for USERNAME). 

If it works, you’ll see each of your videos downloading, as two separate streams, one for audio one for video, and then ffmpeg merging those into one file, which you should be able to play with Quicktime Player.