YouTube Downloader

I recently went on a long trip back home to Florida to see family. Flying all the way there can take about 8 hours and I usually watch movies or work on my computer during that time. But before I ended up leaving I decided that I wanted to download some YouTube videos that I had saved.

So I headed over to the videos one by one and clicked on the Download button where I was hit with this.

Youtube Premium yikes o.o

I started thinking about how I could get around this and I found websites where you can put a URL and it would give you the mp4 file back. But that wasn't a great solution since it is so repetitive for each video I wanted to download. Then I started looking for programmatic ways to achieve this and stumbled upon the pytube package.

It was pretty simple to get up and running. I created a folder called inputs and made a file named videos.txt where I could dump all of the YouTube URLs I wanted to download. From there I just parsed the list line by line and then download for each link and put the mp4 files into a target directory. Here's what I came up with.

Copyvideos.txt:: copy code to clipboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEkfRSNg7Bk&ab_channel=EpicGardening
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvjvzYacgQg&ab_channel=ForgeUtah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTQ1kY8xsY8&ab_channel=CloudGuru

Copyyt-download.py:: copy code to clipboard
from pytube import YouTube

# Video resolution and input/output paths
resolution = "720p"
input_file_name = "videos.txt"
dest_folder_name = "vods"


# Get the links to download
with open(f'./inputs/{input_file_name}', 'r') as inputs:
    links = inputs.readlines()

# Track if we can't download all of the videos
count = 0
total = len(links)

# Download the videos
for link in links:
    link = link.strip()
    yt = YouTube(link)

    print('Downloading:', yt.title)

    # Check for the correct video resolution
    yd = yt.streams.get_by_resolution(resolution)
    if not yd:
        print(f"No {resolution} resolution for the video {yt.title}")
        continue

    yd.download(f"./{dest_folder_name}/")
    count += 1

print("Complete!")

# I want to know if we don't download all of the videos
if count != total:
    print(f"Downloaded {count} out of {total} videos")

I also added in another python script to remove all of the videos from the target directory when I don't want them anymore.

Copyflush.py:: copy code to clipboard
import os, shutil

dest_folder_name = "vods"

folder = f"./{dest_folder_name}"
for filename in os.listdir(folder):
    file = os.path.join(folder, filename)
    try:
        if os.path.isfile(file) or os.path.islink(file):
            os.unlink(file)
        elif os.path.isdir(file):
            shutil.rmtree(file)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Failed to delete {file}")
        print(f"Exception: {e}")

The resulting directory looked like this:

If you want to make modification to the resulting resolution you only need to change the variable at the top of the script or you can use the get_highest_resolution() method instead of yt.streams.get_by_resolution(resolution). I choose to keep it at 720p because I didn't want to download 4k videos and take up all my disk space.

Hope you enjoyed the article and that you got something useful out of it. I found this script really helpful in filling the time on my trip where I didn't have wifi and I will definitely be using it again. Thank you for reading and please share the article if you thought it was helpful!