pafy - Python API for YouTube

By Vasudev Ram

PAFY (Python API For YouTube) is a Python library that does what the name says on the tin - it allows you to access YouTube videos programmatically, get information about them, download them, etc.

Full documentation for Pafy is here.

You can install Pafy with the command: pip install pafy

I tried out Pafy a little, and whatever I tried worked the way the docs said it would.

Here is a simple example of using Pafy to get info about a YouTube video and download it to your machine. I used the video 'Concurrency is not Parallelism' - by Rob Pike, co-inventor of the Go language, in the example. The video is also embedded below:

import pafy

# Concurrency is not parallelism - video URL = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_DpYBzKso"
cinp_url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_DpYBzKso"

cinp_video = pafy.new(cinp_url)
cv = cinp_video

print "Info for video 'Concurrency is not Parallelism' by Rob Pike, Commander, Google:"
print 'Title:', cv.title
print 'Length:', cv.length
print 'Duration:', cv.duration
print 'Description:', cv.description

"""
This fragment prints info about the streams available in the video.
streams = cv.streams
for s in streams:
    print(s)
"""

# Get the best stream for the video.
best = cv.getbest()

# Download the best stream.
best.download(quiet=False, filepath=best.title + "." + best.extension)

The Pafy download() method not only downloads the video, it also shows the size downloaded so far as a percentage, the download speed, and the ETA for the download, in real time.

Also check out my earlier post on another YouTube tool in Python:

youtube-dl, a YouTube downloader in Python


- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises - Python consulting and training

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