YoutubeSnoop

A Youtube downloader of the highest quality

Installation

You can install it via pip:

$ pip install youtubesnoop

Prerequisites

• ffmpeg must be installed and available in your PATH.

Usage

A simple command-line tool that downloads Youtube videos in the highest quality available.

Just provide a Youtube URL:

$ youtubesnoop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

It will download single tracks to this format:

{title}.flac

Downloading Album Playlists

Provide a playlist URL and it will create a folder for the artist and nest it with the year and album title:

{artist}/{year} - {albumTitle}

This fits my personal need to download albums from Youtube playlists.

Each track will be named like this:

{tracknumber}. {title}.flac

It will try to infer the metadata from the playlist and set it in the downloaded files. Otherwise it will prompt you for it. It uses the mutagen library to set the metadata with the help of musicbrainz to fix any mistakes. It uses musicbrainzngs to download cover art as Cover.jpg or Cover.png and place it in the folder and added to the metadata of each track.

Videos

It downloads as flac files per default but with the --video flag it will download the video as mp4 instead.

403 Forbidden Errors

Youtube constantly changes their API. The solution is likely to upgrade the yt-dlp dependency that this package uses under the hood.

Run:

$ pip install --upgrade youtubesnoop

Or:

$ pipx upgrade yt-dlp

Windows Note

It has been tested on Windows (Powershell) and MacOS.

For Powershell, remember to wrap the URL in quotes to avoid issues with special characters such as & being interpreted.

On Windows, don't use Git Bash since prompt_toolkit has issues with it ANSI escape codes etc.