cap_from_youtube

Get an OpenCV video capture from an YouTube video URL

Why

• pafy is widely used to get the video URL from a YouTube video URL, but since it uses youtube-dl which has not been updated recently, it suffers from some issues (dislike_count not found...).
• This repository is a simplified version of what pafy does, by just getting the url of the video and creating an OpenCV video capture from it.
• It uses YT-DLP (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp), which is a fork of youtube-dl that is updated frequently.

Requirement

• YT-DLP
• OpenCV
• NumPy

Installation

• The easiest way is to install it with pip:

pip install cap_from_youtube

• You can also install it from GitHub:

pip install git+https://github.com/ibaiGorordo/cap_from_youtube

Usage

cap_from_youtube()

• cap_from_youtube() is the main function to obtain a video capture from a YouTube video URL.
• It requires the video URL as input and returns a cv2.VideoCapture object.
• By default, it returns the video with the highest resolution available.
• You can specify the resolution you want to get with the resolution parameter.
  • Available resolutions: '144p', '240p', '360p', '480p', '720p', '720p60', '1080p', '1080p60', 'best'
• Example:

from datetime import timedelta
import cv2
from cap_from_youtube import cap_from_youtube

youtube_url = 'https://youtu.be/LXb3EKWsInQ'
start_time = timedelta(seconds=5)
cap = cap_from_youtube(youtube_url, 'best', start=start_time)

cv2.namedWindow('video', cv2.WINDOW_NORMAL)
while True:
    ret, frame = cap.read()
    if not ret:
        break
    cv2.imshow('video', frame)
    if cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF == ord('q'):
        break

list_video_streams()

• You can also use the list_video_streams() function to get the list of available video streams.
• It requires the video URL as input and returns two values:
  • streams: a list of VideoStream with the information of the available video streams.
  • resolutions: a NumPy array with the available resolutions.
• Example:

from cap_from_youtube import list_video_streams

youtube_url = 'https://youtu.be/LXb3EKWsInQ'
streams, resolutions = list_video_streams(youtube_url)

for stream in streams:
    print(stream)

References

• pafy: https://github.com/mps-youtube/pafy
• yt-dlp: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
• imread_from_url: https://github.com/Kazuhito00/imread_from_url