Use JavaScript to look through the user's DOM. Take anything that's <embed> on the page... document.getElementsByTagName("embed") That's usually a video player. The embed tag has a URL, use JavaScript to parse the URL that's written in the embed tag, you have your video URL. if you use JavaScript to navigate to a page, you can effectively download it. For instance if you used window.location.href = 'VIDEO URL'; you would download the video. Example embedded code: <embed width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tgbNymZ7vqY"> Please note: usually people are using iframes now to plop a video onto the page: <iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tgbNymZ7vqY"> </iframe> So maybe your code should be able to parse things like YouTube URLs within iframes, as well as embedded videos.