November 2008
Intermediate to advanced
512 pages
12h 6m
English
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Downloading Videos from YouTube
Now that we've seen how YouTube's API works, we'll now show how to download YouTube videos, first manually with your browser and then programmatically with code.
Downloading a YouTube Video with Your Browser
YouTube videos are stored in the Flash video (FLV) format, which is what we'll want to download.
Before we show how you can programmatically download a YouTube video, let's look at how you can download a video just by using your browser. To begin with, open any YouTube video page—say, the infamous Tay Zonday "Chocolate Rain" video, which is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA. From this URL, we can determine that the video ID (v=) is "EwTZ2xpQwpA".
YouTube Blocks You (by Design)
YouTube has a (hidden) URL that you can use to directly download a video, but you need to pass in two things, a video_id and a session token. A session token is an identifier that YouTube assigns to a browser that lasts for approximately 15 minutes. If you don't have a valid session token, YouTube will block your request to download a Flash video.
To see this in action, open your browser, go to http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=EwTZ2xpQwpA, and notice how YouTube pretends the URL is a bad URL by sending back an HTTP 404 Not Found error to Internet Explorer browsers (Firefox 3 users will see a blank page), as shown in Figure 4-7. You get a 404 error because you must append a valid session token to the URL for the request to work.
Figure 4-7. YouTube will return ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.