Youtube mp3 Batch Downloader

Note for BitOverflow Participants

At this stage, the project is working as a command-line app. You, as a participant are required to develop a GUI interface for turning this into a Windows/Linux Desktop App. The mockup for the GUI is given below:

will add soon

The rest of this readme explains about setting up and using the command-line version of this script.

Console-App Information

I have been thinking about writing scripts to automate my regular tasks and I realized that I often find myself using third-party sites and sometimes manually converting videos to mp3 so I took up the task of writing a script of downloading batches of mp3 audio of youtube videos using their links. I use the functions of python module youtube_dl in this script. As of now, this script can do the following:

• download batches/single mp3 audio of youtube videos
  • links are to be provided in the links.txt file (can be easily altered to your choice)
  • it actually downloads the .webm file and then converts the file into .mp3.
  • bitrate of audio file can be specified
• download batches/single video file of youtube videos
  • video quality can be specified

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a started for being able to use the scripts for downloading youtube video/audio at your own machine.

Prerequisite

As the script is written in python, you are to download Python on your system, specifically Python 3.5 or latest. The installer can be downloaded here.

The other task that you need to do is to install the python module youtube_dl. You can download it using pip, which is a Python package manager and is included with Python. If you have never heard of it, you can learn about it here.

youtube_dl can be installed using pip via the command:

pip install youtube-dl

The youtube-dl git repo contains detailed information for the its usage and the source code.

Audio/Video Codec

youtube-dl utilizes ffmpeg/ffprobe for conversion tasks and therefore you are required to have it in your system PATH.

For Windows:

Download the codec from here and extract and place the files in your system PATH.

For Linux:

Download it using terminal:

sudo apt get install ffmpeg

Usage

After the preprequisites have been fulfilled, we can begin downloading by specifying the link(s) in the links.txt one line each.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blahblahblah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blahblahblah

Now, simply run the script in command prompt or shell.

python youtube-dlr.py

The default location for downloading files is in the download/ folder in the current directory (can be altered in the code).

Acknowledgments

• Ricardo Garcia for creating youtube-dl
• Zeranoe FFMPEG

Update #1

• added instructions for installing ffmpeg on windows and linux
• added linux supported python script youtube-dlr-linux.py
  • nothing special, simply changed path names. most of the code in supported in linux