How to download a YouTube video using the YouTube's API

I looked at the Python's API overview: Developer's Guide: Python

But there isn’t any reference to how to download a video. How can I download videos using the API?

5 Answers

Downloading Youtube videos is against their Terms of Service, so their API's will not support that.

Page linked above refers to Youtube ToS that states:

You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content.

Check out Python API for YouTube, it downloads videos or can just get the direct URL to the video:

There is obviously no api-side option, but you can simply use youtube-dl and call it via subprocess inside your python script, which is way easier/stable than using on standalone youtube-downloaders.

I know this posting is old, but thought would put in recent developments for anyone interested. From 2018 pytube is available which is lightweight library written in Python. It has no third party dependencies and aims to be highly reliable.

From the github page

pytube is a very serious, lightweight, dependency-free Python library (and command-line utility) for downloading YouTube Videos.

Downloading from youtube is easy one-liner.

from pytube import YouTube YouTube(').streams.first().download() yt = YouTube(') yt.streams .filter(progressive=True, file_extension='mp4') .order_by('resolution') .desc() .first() .download() 

I could download youTube video successfully using following code, if this helps someone. Note: i'm using colab

# install python dependencies !pip install -q youtube-dl from IPython.display import YouTubeVideo YOUTUBE_ID = 'M6KD0pDrBkk' YouTubeVideo(YOUTUBE_ID) # download the youtube with the given ID !youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]' --output "youtube.%(ext)s" # cut the seconds between 15 and 20 !ffmpeg -y -loglevel info -i youtube.mp4 -ss 00:00:01.0 -t 5 video.mp4