Download videos from Youtube using C#

Question

Hey,

I want to download videos from Youtube using C# and I looked everywhere for the right address of the download page but I couldn't find it. Every address people posted is no longer available.

So, does anybody know a currently Open Source project that download the videos from Youtube? Or does anybody know what is the address of the Youtube videos?

Thanks a lot.

Dipal Choksi · Answer

Hi I shd have researched some more - had posted a quick link which seemed relevant. YouTube terms of use do not permit video downloads - wikipedia mentions they dont include a download button and it is prohibited in their terms of use. Apparently no one on the community has tried this personally but sometimes a helpful link or even a right phrase in the response helps fit things together.. Hope you do get the solution you are looking for! Unfortunately, even if you find a legal/valid reason for the requirement, it might not be feasible to accomplish this task - sometime in 2010, youtube changed their format to include unique machine id for each computer that visits it. The solution will most likely involve scraping. Here are some resources which might help - again, you may already have checked all this information. http://www.pcworld.com/article/244289/how_to_download_youtube_videos.html http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/YouTube_Downloader.aspx http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/MyDownloader.aspx Do post back on your progress!

Sam Hobbs · Answer

I really think that if someone knew then they would say so. Most likely no one here knows the answer. It is my understanding that YouTube does not support downloading of videos. In other words, they have not provided a documented way to do it. I see software saying it can be done but I assume they are not using anything provided and documented by YouTube. Apparently Google has developed and documented something that makes it relatively easy to use YouTube from your program. I think it will help you but if so then you need to read the documentation and learn how to use it. I think people sell software that does what you are trying to do and if you want to do it yourself also then you must expect to invest some time. If the Google API does not do it then it will be a lot of work; you will need to learn how to get the data from the HTML from the YouTube web site and that will likely take a couple of months for you to learn. My guess is that the Google API will help and you simply have to spend a little time studying it; I doubt you will find anything easier.

Imri Barr · Answer

bump. Still relevant.

Imri Barr · Answer

Thanks for the reply. I've already seen this very article and I haven't noticed any refer to a download feature... did you?

Dipal Choksi · Answer

you can check this one, in case you haven't done so before: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_dotnet.html HTH!