Download your entire Vimeo library

Set up the folder and the tool

We'll use yt-dlp (free and open source) together with ffmpeg. Open your terminal, create a working folder and download the program into it: paste the block for your system as-is. Everything else happens inside that folder.

macOS · Only if you don't have Homebrew yet

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Check whether you already have it by typing "brew --version" in the terminal: if it answers with a number, skip this block. If not, the installer will ask for your Mac's administrator password and first download the Xcode Command Line Tools; that's a few minutes and a couple of gigabytes, once only. On Windows none of this is needed: winget ships with up-to-date Windows 10 and 11.

macOS · Terminal

mkdir -p ~/Desktop/vimeo && cd ~/Desktop/vimeo
curl -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp_macos -o yt-dlp && chmod +x yt-dlp
brew install ffmpeg

Windows · PowerShell

mkdir $HOME\Desktop\vimeo; cd $HOME\Desktop\vimeo
curl.exe -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp.exe -o yt-dlp.exe
winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Important: do not install yt-dlp with "brew install yt-dlp" or "winget install yt-dlp.yt-dlp". Those bring the latest stable release, which since July 2026 fails on Vimeo with the error "Failed to fetch macos OAuth token". The executable you download above is the nightly channel, the only one that works today; to update it later just run "./yt-dlp -U".

Test with one video

Make sure it works with a single video, from that same folder. Copy the URL of any of your videos and replace its ID in the command. The --cookies-from-browser option uses your logged-in session: without it Vimeo refuses the download, and with it you also reach private videos.

macOS · Terminal

./yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome --merge-output-format mp4 "https://vimeo.com/TU_VIDEO_ID"

Windows · PowerShell

.\yt-dlp.exe --cookies-from-browser chrome --merge-output-format mp4 "https://vimeo.com/TU_VIDEO_ID"

Replace "chrome" with the browser where your Vimeo session is open (firefox, edge, safari, brave). For password-protected videos add --video-password "YOUR_PASSWORD". On macOS, if you pick safari you must grant Full Disk Access to Terminal. And if you see a couple of "Failed to parse XML" warnings, ignore them: the download carries on another way.

Download your whole library

Create a urls.txt file with one URL per line (one per video) in the same folder from step 1 and run this command inside it. It downloads everything in the best available quality, using each video's title as the filename.

macOS · Terminal

./yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome -S "quality,res,codec:avc" --merge-output-format mp4 -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" -a urls.txt

Windows · PowerShell

.\yt-dlp.exe --cookies-from-browser chrome -S "quality,res,codec:avc" --merge-output-format mp4 -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" -a urls.txt

Tip: copy your video URLs from your Vimeo "My videos" page and paste them into urls.txt.

Upload them to STRIMY

Open your STRIMY dashboard, go to My videos → Upload and drag in the downloaded files. We transcode them to adaptive streaming, generate thumbnails and organize them into your folders automatically.