Author: kamrancharlesnayebi

The pytube package has been broken by a recent Youtube update and the maintainers have gone AWOL for a while now, so it’s safe to assume this project is unmaintained.

If what you want is the absolute easiest way to download the video or audio content from YouTube, you should be using a website like YT1s. The interface is simple and efficient and there doesn’t seem to be any ads like other websites. You should take this with a grain of salt though because I have some level of ad blocking integrated in my browser.

However, these sites have their limits. For one, they are pretty short lived as they go against YouTube’s Terms of Service:

The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:

1. access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as specifically permitted by the Service;  (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders; or (c) as permitted by applicable law;

Youtube Terms of Service

Therefore, when one gets too popular because they offer better service, they get taken down by Google’s lawyers.

The ones that remain for a long time then are the ones who offer the worst user experience with deceptive, annoying, and potentially dangerous ads that they have to run to pay for running this service. They also generally limit the quality and length of the videos that you can download. You must remember that as with all services on the internet, they cost money to run and that money must come out of the user’s pockets one way or another, especially for something as expensive as video delivery.

What’s the solution then? Not using a third party service for something that your computer can do on its own! The solution that has worked best for me is to use pytube. It’s a python library for downloading videos from YouTube, but they also have a CLI for downloading stuff without having to write any code.

This solution particularly appeals to me as a programmer that already has Python and pip installed, but if you don’t I’ll try to give a quick guide on how to install it.

Linux

For Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint, open a terminal and type in:

sudo apt install python3

For the other distros, I can’t test the installation on all of them, but some version of python will be included for your package manager so run the command for that. If you’re not certain of what that means, you can just look at this article, select the command for your distro and remove the “-pip” at the end.

To install pip on Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint:

sudo apt install python3-pip

For the other distros, it’s in the same article that I put in earlier.

MacOS

If you’re on MacOS you apparently already have python installed, but it’s quite old so I would recommend running the installer for python3. This article might be useful.

Then open the command line and run:

python3 -m ensurepip

Windows

Then press your windows key and type in command prompt to open your terminal.

Installing pytube

No matter your operating system, you should now have python and pip installed. To check if it really is, run this command in your terminal.

pip --version

It should give you something like this:

Now you just need to run this command to install pytube:

pip install pytube

If you get the error : externally-managed-environment, then you need to repeat the previous instructions using pipx instead of pip.

Using pytube

And you’re done! Now to use it you just need to type in

pytube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abcdefghijk

Now if you get an error saying something about SSL certificates the solutions for Windows and MacOS are at the bottom of the article.

It will download the video in an mp4 format in the directory that you are currently using in your command line. This is the path that you see before every command, in my case it would be C:\Users\User. If you want it to download in another directory you can use the cd command:

cd C:/Users/User/Downloads

In my case my user’s name is User, but you would need to change it to frank23 or whatever your user’s name is on your operating system. I showed an example for Windows, but cd works on Linux and MacOS as well.

If you just want the audio you can use the same command, but add “-a” at the end, like this:

pytube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abcdefghijk -a

If you want to know more uses of the pytube cli here is the official page.

I hope this article was useful, it certainly makes it a lot easier for me when I want to add new songs to my collections of mp3s and I wanted to share! If you have had problems during the installation or have some clarifications, feel free to post a comment, it would be appreciated especially for the MacOS section because I have no Apple devices and emulating them is a lot harder than it should be so I couldn’t test out anything.

[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED]

If you’re getting this error, it means that python is using the operating system’s trust store and that it can’t find the local certificates to communicate with the https protocol.

Windows

Credit to Michal Karm Babacek for sharing the solution in this thread.

MacOS

Go to /Applications/Python3.x and click on the file named “Install Certificates.command”. Then try the command to download YouTube videos again. It should work.

Credit to RebelliousPebble for sharing the solution in this thread.