4/29/23 update: I think that at some point JoVE changed how their videos are accessed, and the approach below is no longer applicable.
Part of my goal for this holiday break is to work on an exploratory research grant proposal for a high-throughput investigation studying how protein coding variants in inflammasome components lead to various autoinflammatory diseases. I heard there were supposed to be some cool-looking videos of ASC speck formation (like this video from Kuri et al, 2017, J Cell Biol), so I did a google search for such videos. This lead me to some videos at JoVE, the Journal of Visual Experiments. CWRU has institutional access to tons of journals including JoVE, but always having to log in to watch the video is kind of clunky, so I wanted to be able to download the relevant videos. Thus, I just looked under the hood at the html used to organize the webpage, and found where the video lived so I could download it. Here are some instructions for doing just that:
1) Using Google Chrome (though I’m sure other browsers like FireFox should do this as well), log into your institutional access service to get to the login-protected JoVE page with the full video.
2) Right click on the area with the video and hit “inspect”.
3) In the top inspector pane, go to the area that says something along the lines of…:
<video class=”fp-engine” playsinline=”” webkit-playsinline=”” preload=”none” autoplay=”” crossorigin=”anonymous” src=”blob:https://www.jove.com/d4697446-c6f4-4902-ab6b-37580284d671″ style=”display: block;”><source type=”video/mp4″ src=”https://cloudflare2.jove.com/CDNSource/protected/57463_Fink_051418_P_Web.mp4?verify=1576994641-Y2wt%2BLiPU3Iw9mTSO%2BNHPlX%2BjGEwXuULht5jH92%2FuzY%3D”><track kind=”subtitles” label=”English” srclang=”en” src=”/files/vtt/57463/57463.vtt” id=”en-English”></video>
… and click on the triangle to open up that section and display all of the sub-sections of it.
4) The first subsection should say something like …:
<source type=”video/mp4″ src=”https://cloudflare2.jove.com/CDNSource/protected/57463_Fink_051418_P_Web.mp4?verify=1576994641-Y2wt%2BLiPU3Iw9mTSO%2BNHPlX%2BjGEwXuULht5jH92%2FuzY%3D”>
… and right click on the “src” link and open in a new window.
5) Right click again and download the video file to your hard drive. It will likely be a .mp4 file format. Now you can rewatch it without having to be logged into the JoVE website.
PS-1. Once you’re at the first part of step 3, you can just look in the “src” section and copy-paste the text starting at “https://…” up through “…mp4″ (and not ?verify…” and copy-paste that to a new window as well, and skip to step 5. Though I suppose this is actually the same amount of effort as actually doing step 4.
PS-2. Yes, I find it kind of funny that I just made a tutorial of saving a video from a visual tutorial.
PS-3. For the record, I’m not supporting / condoning bypassing the gatekeeping code this journal has for accessing the full-content. I’m mostly just trying to streamline science so people can get more / better work done without impediments. As far as I can tell, you still do need institutaional access to be able to access the full file (doing the above steps at the non-logged in site only links you to the “teaser” video).