Pytube | Python library to download youtube videos – GeeksforGeeks

YouTube is very popular video sharing website. Downloading a video from YouTube is a tough job. Downloading the Downloader and get the video using that or go to any other website which fetches the video and saves on your computer. Using Python, this task is very easy. Few lines of code will download the video from YouTube for you. For this, there a python library named as ‘pytube’. pytube is a lightweight, dependency-free Python library which is used for downloading videos from the web.
pytube is not the native library. You need to install it before using it. Installation is easy when you have pip. In the Terminal or Command Prompt, type the following command to install pytube.

pip install pytube

In case you don’t have pip, install it as an external library.

Downloading a single video

pytube library makes the video downloading very easy. Create the object of the YouTube module by passing the link as the parameter. Then, get the appropriate extension and resolution of the video. You can set the name of the file as your convenience, in another case original name will be kept. After that, download the file using the download function which has one parameter which is the location where to download the file.

Python3

from pytube import YouTube 

SAVE_PATH = "E:/"

link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWOoBJUqlbI"

try: 

    yt = YouTube(link) 

except: 

    print("Connection Error")

mp4files = yt.filter('mp4') 

yt.set_filename('GeeksforGeeks Video')  

d_video = yt.get(mp4files[-1].extension,mp4files[-1].resolution) 

try: 

    d_video.download(SAVE_PATH) 

except: 

    print("Some Error!") 

print('Task Completed!') 

Downloading a file takes some time as a very large amount of data is being downloaded from the web. Depending on the speed of the connection, time taken to execute the program varies. In case you wish to download the number of files, go with the next case.

Downloading multiple videos

The basic task of downloading the multiple videos is same as downloading a single video. We can use a for loop for downloading the video.

Python3

from pytube import YouTube 

SAVE_PATH = "E:/"

link=["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWOoBJUqlbI",     "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWOoBJUqlbI"

    ]

for i in link: 

    try: 

        yt = YouTube(i) 

    except: 

        print("Connection Error") 

    mp4files = yt.filter('mp4') 

    d_video = yt.get(mp4files[-1].extension,mp4files[-1].resolution) 

    try: 

        d_video.download(SAVE_PATH) 

    except: 

        print("Some Error!") 

print('Task Completed!') 

In this, we have used a for loop for downloading multiple files as shown. One can use file handling for keeping the all the links in a file which needs to be downloaded.

Download multiple videos using File Handling

Using file handling, we can open the file which has the group of links in it. Traversing every link of a text file and applying the very basic video downloading program is done here. Here, we have a text file named as “links_file.txt” which has all the links which need to be downloaded.

Python3

from pytube import YouTube 

SAVE_PATH = "E:/"

link=open('links_file.txt','r') 

for i in link: 

    try: 

        yt = YouTube(i) 

    except: 

        print("Connection Error")  

    mp4files = yt.filter('mp4') 

    d_video = yt.get(mp4files[-1].extension,mp4files[-1].resolution) 

    try: 

        d_video.download(SAVE_PATH) 

    except: 

        print("Some Error!") 

print('Task Completed!') 

Important Points:

1. Make sure you are connected to the internet to download the videos. Otherwise it will raise an error.
2. Don’t use the set_filename() function in any loop. In this case, only one video will be downloaded.
3. You can modify the names everytime using another array of names.
4. Connection Interruption in between will also raise an error and video will not be downloaded in that case.

This article is contributed by Rishabh Bansal. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using contribute.geeksforgeeks.org or mail your article to [email protected]. See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks.

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