iOS YouTube Downloader with Pythonista

Useful script created by “pudquick” on the Pythonista forums:

Browse to http://m.youtube.com in Mobile Safari, view a video that you like (press Stop if it starts playing, you need to be looking at the page - not the video actually playing), then click on “Bookmarks” and select the bookmarklet that you created. This will launch my script, which will pull the URL of the page you were looking at as an argument, parse it, figure out the direct download URL for the .mp4 video file, then open iDownloads directly to that URL to start downloading it.

As pudquick says, third-party YouTube clients with a “download” functionality are usually removed from the App Store as Google doesn’t allow downloading video files from the service. However, by using Pythonista to crawl the webpage and find the direct .mp4 link of a video, pudquick managed to put together a handy solution to go from your web browser to Pythonista and then directly to iDownloads to start downloading the .mp4 file.

However, I don’t use iDownloads – I prefer Readdle’s Documents and good.iWare’s GoodReader. Replacing iDownloads with your favorite file manager is very easy: in the penultimate line of the script, replace the iDownloads:// URL with the one of the app you want to use (the URL of the .mp4 will be appended to it). Unfortunately, Documents doesn’t seem to be able to download .mp4 files in this way, but I had no problems with GoodReader. Simply use ghttp:// to forward the .mp4 file to GoodReader and start downloading it automatically.

Make sure to check out pudquick’s explanation of the script and bookmarklet here. For our previous coverage of Pythonista, check out our tag page and my original review.