Update 9/29/2022: By popular request, I modified the Get-EventSession script so it is now able to also download MEC sessions (-Event MEC). See below for details.

A quick post for those that are looking for a simple way to download the Microsoft Exchange Community (MEC) Technical Airlift 2022 sessions for offline viewing, here’s a simple way to accomplish this:

1. Get youtube-dl.exe here. Youtube-dl is a tool to download videos or playlists from Youtube.
2. Get aria2c.exe here. Aria2c can be used to download media using multiple streams, reducing time it takes to download video content.
3. Put the executables from both downloads in the same folder, and, using a a (PowerShell) command prompt, run the following:

.\youtube-dl.exe -o "C:\MEC2022\%(playlist_index)s-%(title)s.mp4" --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args "-x 16 -k 1M" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxdTT6-7g--2POisC5XcDQxUXHhWsoZc9

• “C:\MEC2022” is the folder where the downloaded files will be stored. Change when needed. For file naming, variables are used with define the name of the downloaded files using a prefix of the sequence number (from the playlist) together with the title of the video (session).
• –external-downloader tells youtube-dl to use specified download utility (aria2c) instead of its own engine. The external-downloader-args parameters define concurrency and chunk size.
• The last part is the URL for the MEC 2022 playlist.

9/29/2022: Alternatively, you can now use Get-EventSession (version 3.7 and up) to download MEC sessions. The script will parse the information shared through the playlist, but some usual attributes are missing, but there also some new attributes, such as likes and views. To use the script to download MEC session videos:

Get-EventSession> .\Get-EventSession.ps1 -Event MEC -DownloadFolder c:\MEC20222 -Format 22 -Speaker 'Michel de Rooij'

Few notes:

• As there are no session codes in the YouTube metadata, session code is set to equal the playlist index.
• Speaker names will be extracted from the description when present.
• The session timestamp will be the upload date of the video.
• Likes, Views and Duration are YouTube specific properties returned.

Using views and likes, you can do cool things such as get a scoreboard of the Top 10 most viewed videos from MEC playlist:

.\Get-EventSession.ps1 -Event MEC -InfoOnly | Sort Views -desc | Select -First 10 Title,SpeakerNames, Views, Likes

Note: If you do not specify format, YouTube videos will be downloaded in ‘best’ possible quality, which will be .webm by default. You can prevent this, and download 1080p movies, by specifying -Format 22.