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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T03:16:56+00:00

I need to download videos from youtube using a python script. However i am

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I need to download videos from youtube using a python script. However i am unable to get the url of the video from the youtube page.

For example, given the url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qcmCUsw4EQ&feature=g-all-u&context=G2633db8FAAAAAAAAAAA

  1. I need to download the video as a flv or any other format. Also i need to be able to download it multiple quality.
  2. I tried several scripts like youtube-dl and quvi but they all give errors and dont work. Please help. It shall be deeply appreciated.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You need to parse the flashvars variable of the <embed> tag that contains the video. These change around, so some experimentation may be required to find the current variable names. Roughly speaking, you’ll want to use a libraries like mechanize to grab the HTML of the page and BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML and extract the flashvars field of the <embed> element. Then look around at the variables to figure out which one contains the video URL.

    e.g., 

      br = mechanize.Browser()
  # Browser options
  br.set_handle_equiv(True)
  br.set_handle_redirect(True)
  br.set_handle_referer(True)
  br.set_handle_robots(False)
  # Follows refresh 0 but not hangs on refresh > 0
  br.set_handle_refresh(mechanize._http.HTTPRefreshProcessor(), max_time=1)
  # User-Agent (this is cheating, ok?)
  br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')]
  br.open('%s?v=%s' % (YOUTUBE_URL, vidId))
  soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(br.response().read())
  flashVars = urllib2.urlparse.parse_qs(soup.find('embed').get('flashvars'))
  # Return the first second video source URL
  return flashVars['fmt_stream_map'][0].split('|')[1]
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