How to Download Thinkific Videos for Free

In this article, I will show you walkthrough example of download videos from Thinkific.

This Thinkific course uses Wistia to host all course videos. That means every Thinkific video ultimately loads as an HLS .m3u8 playlist, which you can download with yt-dlp.

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Step 1 — Open DevTools on the Thinkific lesson video page

1. Open the Thinkific course lesson containing the video.
2. Right-click anywhere → Inspect.
3. Go to the Network tab
4. Click Preserve Log
5. Refresh the page & play the video
6. Filter for: m3u8

Step 2 — Select the Correct m3u8 where the 'Request URL' is fast.wistia

You will usually see multiple .m3u8 links, such as:

• https://embed-cloudfront.wistia.com/deliveries/...m3u8
• https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/XXXXXXXXXX.m3u8

✅ Always choose this format:

https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/XXXXXXXXXX.m3u8

This is the master playlist, which:

• Contains all quality levels
• Ensures yt-dlp downloads the best version
• Avoids CloudFront single-quality variants
• Works consistently

Step 3 — Download Using yt-dlp

Run this command format in your terminal program:

yt-dlp "URL"

Be sure to replace URL with the actual fast.wistia URL, for example:

yt-dlp "https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/gpniwm7cus.m3u8"

yt-dlp will:

• Pull the master playlist
• Select the best stream
• Download & merge all segments
• Output a clean .mp4

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Related

• Repository
• Thinkific Downloader Annoucement
• How to Download Thinkific Videos for Free