GoTube – a very simple command line tool for downloading YouTube videos

GoTube

Overview

This repository contains a single-file implementation of YouTube video downloader written in Go. It does not require any third-party packages, only built-in packages from the standard library. The code is compact and easily-readable.

Installation

You can fetch one of the executable binaries (preferably latest one) from Releases. The binaries only support Windows (32 and 64 bit) and Linux (32 and 64 bit) this time.

From Source

If you don't have Go installed yet, download here . Clone this repository and go to the repository directory. Then run the following command:

go build gotube.go

How It Works?

When GoTube receives a YouTube video URL as an input, it will extract a video id portion of the URL. Then it sends a HTTP GET request to a server through URL https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info with the video id as a query string. The GET request will return an encoded data containing YouTube video data which will be decoded by GoTube. It will then extract the video's title, file format and its download URL from the data. After getting all necessary data, GoTube makes a video file with specified title and file format in User's OS and sends another HTTP GET request to the download URL. The data received through the GET request will be copied to the created video file.

Steps:

1. GoTube begins by extracting a video id from a YouTube URL (ex. if the URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aUlHLaVmkc , GoTube will extract 9aUlHLaVmkc part).
2. GoTube sends an HTTP GET request to a server through https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info with the video id as a query string (ex. using id from the previous example, https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=9aUlHLaVmkc ).
3. GoTube retrieves the video's title, file format and its download URL from an encoded data received through the GET request.
4. GoTube creates a video file in User's OS and make another GET request through the download URL.
5. GoTube copies contents of data received through the GET request to the created video file.

Example Commands

gotube -vidurl=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUOHGL4Iv34 -outdir=<download directory>

gotube -vidurl=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh_HyNfyOKs -outdir=<download directory>

With verbose option:

gotube -vidurl=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJMkvlTAzHc -outdir=<download directory> -v

Replace <download directory> your download directory (ex. C:\users\marethyu\documents\poo)

TODO

• Option to download audio only
• Download whole playlist
• Progress bar?