Creating a download button for Wistia videos

When you upload a Wistia video you have the option to allow people to download it.

You do this by going into “edit” for the video, clicking “Video Actions”. Make sure “Share” is on and turn off everything within share except “Download”. You will see a “Configure” section by download. Make sure “Original” is selected.

Depending on how you want your video displayed and how you want your users to interact with it, you might decide you an an external button to trigger the download.

It turns out this is fairly easy to implement, just a small amount of Javascript really.

Here is the JavaScript you would need.

var downloadVideo = function() {
  document.querySelector('[data-channel=download]').click();
};

It forces a click on the HTML element that has an attribute data-channel with the content download.

This code assumes there is only one Wistia video on the page, but using other attributes to limit what happens here should be easy enough.

Here is the most simple form of the HTML you would need, you will have an event listener for this;

<button onClick="downloadVideo()">Download Video</button>

And that is it! I hope this helps someone.