Download YouTube thumbnails with micawber and wget

By Vasudev Ram



I had blogged about micawber earlier, here:

Micawber gets rich content from URLs

Among the data that micawber returns for a URL, is the thumbnail, if it is a video, for example. So I thought of writing a program to download the thumbnail for a given YouTube video using micawber and the wget Python library.

Here's the code for download_youtube_thumbnails.py:

# download_youtube_thumbnails.py
# A program to download YouTube video thumbnail images.
# Author: Vasudev Ram - http://www.dancingbison.com
# Uses the micawber and wget Python libraries.

# micawber: https://github.com/coleifer/micawber
# wget: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wget

import os
import os.path
import micawber
import wget

def download_youtube_thumbnail(video_url, video_name):

    # load up rules for some default providers, such as youtube and flickr
    providers = micawber.bootstrap_basic()

    ret_val = providers.request(video_url)
    if 'thumbnail_url' in ret_val:
        thumbnail = wget.download(ret_val['thumbnail_url'], bar=None)
        root, ext = os.path.splitext(thumbnail)
        new_name = 'thumb_' + video_name + ext
        os.rename(thumbnail, new_name)
        print "Thumbnail downloaded: ", new_name
    else:
        print "'thumbnail_url' key not found in ret_val dict"

def main():

    try:
        # Download the thumbnail for the video of the album 
        # 'Rarely Heard Ragas' by Vilayat Khan.
        download_youtube_thumbnail(
        "http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Qim2av-SRwU",
        'Vilayat_Khan_Rarely_Heard_Ragas')
    except Exception, e:
        print "ERROR: Caught exception: " + repr(e)
        sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

# EOF

And here is its output - the thumbnail - when given the URL for Vilayat Khan playing Rarely Heard Ragas on the sitar:

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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