How to Download Videos from YouTube with Python

This article is a tutorial on how to download YouTube videos using Python and a few libraries.

Requirements:

1. Python 3.0
2. Pip

Install the following packages:

1. win32clipboard— Module to fetch the content of the clipboard
2. pytube — lightweight, Pythonic, dependency-free, library (and command-line utility) for downloading YouTube Videos.

pip install pypiwin32 pytube

Let’s start by importing the libraries in our code

import win32clipboard
from pytube import YouTube

While surfing through Youtube videos, if you wish to download the video, you don’t have to go to a 3rd party website or change the URL, you just need to launch a batch file from your computer, which can be configured to run using shortcut keys.

For the above, we need to copy the URL. When we copy something on our machine, it gets saved into a clipboard. Similarly, if you copy the link to the YouTube video, this link will be stored on the clipboard.

Let’s fetch this link from the clipboard

#default link
link = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaPGpUU6jKQ"
try:
    # get clipboard data
    win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
    link = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData()
    win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
    
except Exception as ex:
    print('Error : ',e)
    exit()

We fetch the link from the clipboard using GetClipboardData() function provided by the win32clipboard module. Now that we have the link we can proceed to download the video.

Let’s write the code to download the video:

try:
    #where to save 
    SAVE_PATH = "PATH_TO_STORE_VIDEO"
    
    yt = YouTube(link)
    print('Title :',yt.title)
    
    print('Available formats :')
    for stream in yt.streams.all():
        print(stream)
        
    itag = input('\nEnter the itag number to download video of that format: ')
    stream = yt.streams.get_by_itag(itag)
    
    print('\nDownloading--- '+yt.title+' into location : '+SAVE_PATH)
    
    stream.download(SAVE_PATH)
    input('Hit Enter to exit')
    
except Exception as e: 
    print("Error",e) #to handle exception 
    input('Hit Enter to exit')

First, we create a variable and store the destination location of the download in it. We, then create the object of the ‘YouTube’ class we imported from ‘pytube’. For creating this object, we send the link to the YouTube video that we fetched from the clipboard.

The video can be downloaded in various formats. These formats can be fetched using streams.all() function. This lists all the available formats for the given video.

We then accept the ‘itag’ of the format in which the video needs to be downloaded. We fetch the stream of the given ‘itag’ and then download it using the ‘download()’ function. We send the download location of the video to this function as a parameter.

Let’s create a batch file that we can run whenever we wish to download the video.

1. Go to the folder where our Python script resides.
2. Create a batch file ‘ytDownloader.bat’.
3. Edit with Notepad →python NAME_OF_PY_SCRIPT.py
4. Save this batch(.bat) file.

Let’s test our code:

Snip of the YouTube video I wish to download

We copy the URL of the YouTube video and run our batch file.

Snip of the output

I hope this article was helpful. Open to suggestions, do not hesitate to give your valuable feedback.

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Thank you for reading!

#python #youtube