There are many resources on How to download YouTube videos using yt-downloaders; this one is different. This article shows how to create a YouTube video/audio downloader in Python without using external libraries.

This article is heavily inspired by https://kakoc.blog/blog/myox-youtube-downloader/; the article shows you how to build a basic YouTube downloader in rust.

We assume that all inputs are in this format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUWxSEwctFU.

This makes it easy for us to extract videoID from the URL. We replace the recurring string, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= with an empty string.

video_id = url.replace("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=", "")

Now, let's get the video information from the special endpoint,

import requests

endpoint = (
    lambda id: f"https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id={id}&el=embedded&ps=default"
)

x = requests.get(endpoint(video_id))
x = x.content.decode("utf-8")

This returns a lot of information in the form of a query string. For those who don't know what a query string is,

first=value1&second=value2&...

A query string is a key=value pair where multiple pairs are separated using a &. This is how the output looks like,

c=WEB&fexp=23735348%2C23744176%2C23748146%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23856950%2C23857948%2C23858057%2C23868330%2C23877069%2C23882685%2C23884386%2C23885566

Python lets us convert the query to JSON,

import urllib.parse as urlparse

d = urlparse.parse_qs(x)

The parsed data is,

{'c': ['WEB'],
 'cr': ['US'],
 'csi_page_type': ['embed'],
 'csn': ['kUm6X_jhIdXRqAG0r5v4DQ'],
 'cver': ['2.20201120.01.00'],
 'enablecsi': ['1'],
...

Now we have a JSON, the data that we require is in, player_response,

d = d.get('player_response')

All the data about the video stream is inside d.get('streamingData')

>> d = d.get('streamingData').keys()
>> d
dict_keys(['expiresInSeconds', 'formats', 'adaptiveFormats'])

The keys, adaptiveFormats and formats, contain various video formats and links to download them.

>> d = d.get('formats')[0]
>> d
{'approxDurationMs': '10007',
 'audioChannels': 2,
 'audioQuality': 'AUDIO_QUALITY_LOW',
 'audioSampleRate': '44100',
 'averageBitrate': 736573,
 'bitrate': 740048,
 'contentLength': '921361',
 'fps': 25,
 'height': 360,
 'itag': 18,
 'lastModified': '1458553967463178',
 'mimeType': 'video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2"',
 'projectionType': 'RECTANGULAR',
 'quality': 'medium',
 'qualityLabel': '360p',
 'url': 'https://r6---sn-un57en7l.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1606065649&ei=kUm6X_jhIdXRqAG0r5v...',
 'width': 640}

Once you have the link you need, download using.

def download_file(url, filename) -> None:
    chunkSize = 1024
    r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
    with open(filename, "wb") as f:
        for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=chunkSize):
            if chunk:
                f.write(chunk)

That's it. We have successfully built a YouTube downloader🥳🥳.

But this does not look good. So I decided to build a YouTube downloader that allows you to select various formats for downloading.

Introducing pytdl

pronounced pie-tee-dee-el

Remember, this is not as good as the ones out there😁.

Install

pip install -U pytdl --user

Usage

pytdl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5c_Ty3RVGA

Demo

Links

GitHub: pytdl