YouTube Video Formats Scraper

Overview

This actor extracts comprehensive technical data from YouTube videos, including all available streaming formats, storyboard fragments, and metadata. It's designed for developers, researchers, and archivists who need direct access to video manifests and stream URLs without using the official YouTube API. The tool supports geo-restricted content via proxies and typically runs in 30-60 seconds per video.

Key Features

• Multi-Format Extraction: Retrieves data for DASH manifests (mp4/webm), storyboard fragments (thumbnail grids), and audio-only or video-only streams.
• Detailed Fragment Data: Provides rows/columns configuration, individual fragment URLs and durations, and HD thumbnail previews for storyboards.
• Quality & Technical Info: Lists available resolutions from 144p to 4K, estimates filesizes, and identifies container formats (webm, mp4, m4a).
• Download-Ready Output: Includes pre-configured HTTP headers (User-Agent, Accept-Language) and downloader chunk sizes for immediate use.
• Proxy Support: Works with residential proxies to bypass regional restrictions.

How to Use

Provide a list of YouTube video URLs in the actor's input. The actor will fetch and parse the video's technical manifests, then return a structured JSON object containing all discovered format data, including direct URLs.

Input Configuration

The input requires a video_urls array. Each item should contain the video URL and the method (always use GET).

{
  "video_urls": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXAMPLE_ID",
      "method": "GET"
    }
  ]
}

Output Example

The output is a JSON array with detailed information for each processed video.

[
  {
    "original_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLqZtded_0&",
    "title": "Example Video Title",
    "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi_webp/2VLqZtded_0/maxresdefault.webp",
    "Video_Formats": [
      {
        "rows": 10,
        "columns": 10,
        "fragments": [
          {
            "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/sb/2VLqZtded_0/storyboard3_L0/default.jpg...",
            "duration": 247
          }
        ],
        "audio_ext": "none",
        "video_ext": "none",
        "http_headers": {
          "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)..."
        }
      },
      {
        "manifest_url": "https://manifest.googlevideo.com/api/manifest/hls_variant...",
        "quality": 9,
        "filesize": 47409955,
        "video_ext": "mp4",
        "container": "mp4_dash"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Output includes:
* fragments: URLs and durations for thumbnail grid images.
* container: Stream container format (e.g., webm, mp4, mp4_dash).
* quality: Numeric quality indicator from 0 (lowest) to 11 (4K).
* filesize: Estimated download size in bytes.
* http_headers: Pre-configured headers for downloading streams or fragments.

Use Cases

• Building custom video downloader tools.
• Analyzing video compression and adaptive streaming setups for research.
• Archiving videos at the highest available quality.
• Bulk exporting format details for automation pipelines.

Privacy & Security

• No YouTube API keys are required.
• GDPR-compliant data handling.
• Proxy-friendly; residential proxies are recommended for geo-restricted content.

Related Tools

• YouTube Transcript Scraper: For extracting subtitles and closed captions: https://apify.com/scrapearchitect/youtube-video-transcript-scraper?fpr=python_automation

For custom requests (e.g., adding bitrate or codec info), contact: scrapearchitect@gmail.com.