Download YouTube Videos in Python With PyTube

In this article we will show you how easy it is to download video and audio from youtube using the pytube library

Table of Contents

Legal waffle

It is generally illegal to download YouTube videos unless you have permission from the owner of the video. YouTube’s ever-changing and bewildering terms of service explicitly prohibit users from downloading videos without the prior consent of the video creator.

If you do you can face legal consequences – now we have gotten through that disclaimer.

Note that in this tutorial I am going to download a video from one of my own YouTube channels for the demo purpose – probably the only traffic it will get thanks to the algorithm

Install PyTube Library

You need to install the PyTube library. This library is on GitHub and can be installed quickly using pip, like this.

pip install pytube

Now let's get on with the interesting part – some code examples

Download video thumbnail

# youtube thumbnail grabber
from pytube import YouTube
import requests
from io import BytesIO
from PIL import Image
 
# paste the YouTube video URL here
url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJrPquHlyGE"
 
# create a YouTube object and get the video thumbnail and title
youtube = YouTube(url)
# Get the URL of the video's thumbnail image
thumbnail_url = youtube.thumbnail_url
 
# display the thumbnail image and title
response = requests.get(thumbnail_url)
img = Image.open(BytesIO(response.content))
img.show()

Get Youtube video title

PyTube provides an easy way to access the video title using the title attribute of the YouTube object.

# youtube video title program in python
from pytube import YouTube
import requests
from io import BytesIO
from PIL import Image
 
# paste the YouTube video URL here
url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJrPquHlyGE"
 
# create a YouTube object and get the video title
youtube = YouTube(url)
title = youtube.title
 
# Print the title of the video
print(title)

Run this on this particular video and you will see the following

5 minutes of lofi music mix 2 - chill

Get list of stream types

A stream is a single audio or video track of a YouTube video that can be downloaded. A video may have multiple available streams, each with different formats, resolutions, and file sizes

# Explore Stream Types to download youtube videos using python
from pytube import YouTube
 
# paste the YouTube video URL here
url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJrPquHlyGE"
 
# get the list of available streams
youtube = YouTube(url)
streams = youtube.streams.all()
 
# Print all stream types
print(streams)

When I ran this I saw the following in the repl

[<Stream: itag=”17″ mime_type=”video/3gpp” res=”144p” fps=”12fps” vcodec=”mp4v.20.3″ acodec=”mp4a.40.2″ progressive=”True” type=”video”>, <Stream: itag=”18″ mime_type=”video/mp4″ res=”360p” fps=”24fps” vcodec=”avc1.42001E” acodec=”mp4a.40.2″ progressive=”True” type=”video”>, <Stream: itag=”22″ mime_type=”video/mp4″ res=”720p” fps=”24fps” vcodec=”avc1.64001F” acodec=”mp4a.40.2″ progressive=”True” type=”video”>, <Stream: itag=”136″ mime_type=”video/mp4″ res=”720p” fps=”24fps” vcodec=”avc1.64001f” progressive=”False” type=”video”>, <Stream: itag=”134″ mime_type=”video/mp4″ res=”360p” fps=”24fps” vcodec=”avc1.4d401e” progressive=”False” type=”video”>, <Stream: itag=”160″ mime_type=”video/mp4″ res=”144p” fps=”24fps” vcodec=”avc1.4d400c” progressive=”False” type=”video”>, <Stream: itag=”139″ mime_type=”audio/mp4″ abr=”48kbps” acodec=”mp4a.40.5″ progressive=”False” type=”audio”>, <Stream: itag=”140″ mime_type=”audio/mp4″ abr=”128kbps” acodec=”mp4a.40.2″ progressive=”False” type=”audio”>, <Stream: itag=”251″ mime_type=”audio/webm” abr=”160kbps” acodec=”opus” progressive=”False” type=”audio”>]

Check list of audio tracks

from pytube import YouTube
 
# paste the YouTube video URL here
url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJrPquHlyGE"
 
# create a YouTube object and get the video stream
youtube = YouTube(url)
 
resolutions = ['144p', '240p', '360p', '480p', '720p', '1080p']
 
for resolution in resolutions:
    streams = youtube.streams.filter(progressive=True, res=resolution)
     
    if len(streams) > 0:
        print(resolution)
    else:
        print(resolution + ' Audio is not available')

On this video we saw the following results in the repl

144p
240p Audio is not available
360p
480p Audio is not available
720p
1080p Audio is not available