How to make a YouTube video & shorts downloader using Python [Tutorial with code]

Have you ever wondered how the YouTube online video downloader works? How does the website manage to download a YouTube video from a URL?

In this tutorial, we will learn how to download a YouTube video using Python.

To run this code you can use any Python IDE. 10 reasons why VScode is better. For this tutorial, I will be using Google Colabs which is similar to Jupyter Notebook but cloud-based so you can execute and save your code online.

Let's start coding out Python YouTube downloader.

Install the pytube library

pytube is a lightweight, Pythonic, dependency-free, library (and command-line utility) for downloading YouTube Videos.

you can download the library using the pip command

Code:

pip install pytube

After installation, you will see the following output on colab notebook.

pip install pytube

Make the video object

To make the video object use the following code. To make the video object video URL is required you can hardcode the URL in the script or in this case I have used the input function to get the URL as input after the program is run. The get_hightest_resultion automatically selects the highest resolution available.

Code:

video_link = input("Enter the YouTube video URL: ")

video_object = YouTube(video_link)
video_object = video_object.streams.get_highest_resolution()

pytube youtube video object code

P.S. You can check the resolution and other details of the video by printing the video_object by using print(video_output).

The output of video_object looks like this.

Call the download() fucntion

In the below code, I have used try and except error handling to catch any error while downloading the video.

Code:

try:
    video_object.download()
except:
    print("An error occurred")
print("Download completed successfully")

pytube YouTube video object download

Run the program and enter the video URL.

Enter URL

You can copy-paste any YouTube video URL into the input and it enter.

Play the output

You can find the downloaded video in the same folder of the script or in my case you can find the downloaded video in Google Colabs file-explorer pane on the left.

You can download the video by double-clicking on the file.