How To Make A YouTube Video Downloader With Python

Have you ever wanted to download your favorite YouTube videos on your computer but did not want to pay for premium? Well then, you have come to the right place! I will teach you how to make a python script with the capabilities of downloading any video you want from YouTube. I hope you fin this article entertaining, useful and educational.

This article assumes basic python knowledge and should not be followed otherwise. Remember, using this script for monetary gain or leaking videos on the internet is a direct violation of YouTube's community guidelines. For personal use only.

To give your script the ability to make requests to YouTube servers, you need to install the pytube module. You can install it as easily as using the command below.

This will allow your python interpreter to use the code in this module.

For more information on the pytube module:

The first thing you want to do is import these modules:

You need the pytube module to download the videos, and the os module for interacting with your system.

To make the script function as expected, you need these lines of code:

This will allow your script to manage the video. You can also add these lines to display the video title and view count:

First you have to focus on the video stream itself with this line of code:

Then you can replace "video_format_function" with the method of your choice. Here they are:

Now that you have hold of the video itself, you can use this function to download it:

This function has a few inputs worth mentioning:

output_path

filename

max_retries

(Str) This parameter is the specified directory in which the video is downloaded to. If you do not include a directory, it will default to your working directory.

(Str) This parameter will become the file name of your video if specified. If you leave this empty, it will default to the video name.

(Int) This parameter will be the number of second attempts to download the video in case of a socket timeout. the default value is 0.

You can add any or none of these parameters, it is all up to you.

Now that you have the code needed for it to simply function, now you can customize it! You can add other libraries and make it do many other things as well. For instance, I decided to make mine a Linux script and alias it in my .bashrc to make it like a terminal command! The code for that is below:

I hoped you enjoyed this article and find many applications for this knowledge.