How to download youtube videos using a python script [closed]

Answer 1

You need to parse the flashvars variable of the tag that contains the video. These change around, so some experimentation may be required to find the current variable names. Roughly speaking, you'll want to use a libraries like mechanize to grab the HTML of the page and BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML and extract the flashvars field of the element. Then look around at the variables to figure out which one contains the video URL.

e.g.,

  br = mechanize.Browser()
  # Browser options
  br.set_handle_equiv(True)
  br.set_handle_redirect(True)
  br.set_handle_referer(True)
  br.set_handle_robots(False)
  # Follows refresh 0 but not hangs on refresh > 0
  br.set_handle_refresh(mechanize._http.HTTPRefreshProcessor(), max_time=1)
  # User-Agent (this is cheating, ok?)
  br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')]
  br.open('%s?v=%s' % (YOUTUBE_URL, vidId))
  soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(br.response().read())
  flashVars = urllib2.urlparse.parse_qs(soup.find('embed').get('flashvars'))
  # Return the first second video source URL
  return flashVars['fmt_stream_map'][0].split('|')[1]