Download any YouTube Video with Python

Over 100,000 people search for ways to download YouTube videos every month. Here’s how you can download a YouTube video with Python, for free. In this post we’re going to cover how to use the youtube_dl library to download YouTube videos with Python. We’re going to first learn about what the youtube_dl library is, and then build a Python program that will download YouTube videos.

In this post we will cover:

• What is the youtube_dl Library?
• How to Download YouTube Videos with the youtube_dl Library

What is the youtube_dl Library?

The youtube_dl library is an open-source command line tool that can download YouTube videos. It is a command line tool, meaning you can run it from your terminal. In addition to having a command line interface, it also has a Python library. The Python library allows you to execute the commands normally executed in the command line with Python. The advantage of using it in Python is having a more customizable interface and compacting other options into one command.

To follow this tutorial, you’ll need to install the Python library for youtube_dl. You can do so by using the line in the terminal below.

pip install youtube_dl

Learn more at yt-dl.org.

Downloading a YouTube Video with the youtube_dl Library

As always, we’ll begin our program by importing libraries. In this case, the only library we need is the youtube_dl library. Let’s create a function that will download a YouTube video from a link. The only parameter it will take is the link itself. We’ll start our function by defining some options for youtube_dl. We’ll tell it that we want our function in mp4 format and also to save it as the id of the video.

Next, we’ll strip the link to get the YouTube video ID. We’ll use the YoutubeDL object to extract the info from the video including the metadata. Then we’ll print out and return the save location. The extract_info function does the downloading part. Running the download_video function on a link will save the video as a .mp4 file in your current directory.

import youtube_dl
 
def download_video(link):
    ydl_opts = {
        'format': 'mp4',
        'outtmpl': "./%(id)s.%(ext)s",
    }
    _id = link.strip()
    meta = youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opts).extract_info(_id)
    save_location = meta['id'] + ".mp4"
    print(save_location)
    return save_location

Further Reading

• Matrix Multiplication in Basic Python
• Multiprocessing Python Functions with Dependencies
• Build an AI Content Moderation System
• Python High Low Guessing Game
• Python Web Scraping with Selenium and Beautiful Soup 4

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