Tuesday, October 18, 2011

You Tube Downloader

I have a working You Tube Downloader.

There are many pieces of software that are available to do this but many are nothing more than "shill-ware" and function by capturing the You Tube video in real-time and then saving it in a format likley to be only compatible with the program that downloaded it. The reason for this is to encourage you to buy other products from the company that gave you the downloader.

Other reasons why the popular You Tube downloaders are of secondary usefulness is becuase of copyright restrictions. It is not a good idea to offer a program that can capture the video streams so that they can saved to your drive and then uploaded again to file sharing sites.

The program that I have is a command-line Python script that was developed by Phil Lewis and needs to have a Python interpreter installed on your computer.

Files downloaded are in the .flv format as they are processed using the RTMP library and FVStreamer programs. The .flv files can be converted to any format you desire for playback on devices such as the Apple iPad and Touch. The .flv files will play on your computer without conversion using the VLC player.


The script has to be run from the command prompt and the install of Python for Windows confuses this as there is a GUI that is provided in addition to the interpreter.

The confusion for me, but then I know that I am stupid! is that the youtube-dl script had to be run from the command line with an argument that was at least a URL for the YouTube to be downloaded. This was not possible if the Python interpreter was run using the menu option that the Python for Windows installs as a default. To run the script you have to go to the Python directory and run it from a command prompt from there. I guess that you could make the path of the computer such that the interpreter can be found from anywhere.

YouTube Downloader by Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez - running in Python command prompt

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