Parse YouTube video metadata

To parse YouTube video metadata, you typically want to extract details such as:

• Title

• Description

• Channel name

• Upload date

• Video ID

• Duration

• View count

• Like count

• Comment count

• Tags (if available)

• Thumbnail URLs

Common Methods to Parse YouTube Metadata:

1. Using YouTube Data API v3 (Recommended by Google)

The YouTube Data API allows you to retrieve full metadata using the video ID.

Steps:

1. Get a Google Developer API Key from Google Cloud Console.

2. Use the following endpoint:
   https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet,contentDetails,statistics&id=VIDEO_ID&key=YOUR_API_KEY

Example (Python using requests):

python
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import requests

API_KEY = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
VIDEO_ID = 'VIDEO_ID_HERE'

url = f'https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet,contentDetails,statistics&id={VIDEO_ID}&key={API_KEY}'
response = requests.get(url)
data = response.json()

if 'items' in data and len(data['items']) > 0:
    video_data = data['items'][0]
    title = video_data['snippet']['title']
    description = video_data['snippet']['description']
    channel = video_data['snippet']['channelTitle']
    upload_date = video_data['snippet']['publishedAt']
    view_count = video_data['statistics'].get('viewCount')
    like_count = video_data['statistics'].get('likeCount')
    comment_count = video_data['statistics'].get('commentCount')
    duration = video_data['contentDetails']['duration']
    print(f'Title: {title}')
    print(f'Description: {description}')
    print(f'Channel: {channel}')
    print(f'Upload Date: {upload_date}')
    print(f'Views: {view_count}')
    print(f'Likes: {like_count}')
    print(f'Comments: {comment_count}')
    print(f'Duration: {duration}')

2. Using pytube (For Python-based scripts, no API key needed)

python
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from pytube import YouTube

yt = YouTube('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID')
print("Title:", yt.title)
print("Description:", yt.description)
print("Channel:", yt.author)
print("Publish Date:", yt.publish_date)
print("Views:", yt.views)
print("Length (seconds):", yt.length)
print("Thumbnail URL:", yt.thumbnail_url)

3. Online Tools and Extensions

There are also tools like:

• yt-dlp (CLI tool)

• Chrome extensions like “Vidooly” or “TubeBuddy”

4. HTML Scraping (Not Recommended)

You could scrape metadata from the YouTube page source using BeautifulSoup, but it’s brittle, violates YouTube’s TOS, and can break at any time.

Let me know if you want a ready-to-run code snippet or if you’re targeting a specific platform or programming language.