README

This is forked from Athlon1600/youtube-downloader

YouTube Downloader

This project was inspired by a very popular youtube-dl python package:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

Yes, there are multiple other PHP-based youtube downloaders on the Internet, but most of them haven't been updated in years, or they depend on youtube-dl itself.

Pure PHP-based YouTube downloaders that work, and are kept-up-to date just do not exist.

For v4.1.x,
the script uses no JavaScript interpreters, no calls to shell... nothing but pure PHP with no heavy dependencies either.

That's all there is to it!

⚠️ Legal Disclaimer

This program is for personal use only. Downloading copyrighted material without permission is against YouTube's terms of services. By using this program, you are solely responsible for any copyright violations. We are not responsible for people who attempt to use this program in any way that breaks YouTube's terms of services.

Installation

Recommended way of installing this is via Composer:

composer require kclauhk/youtube-downloader

For pure PHP version:

composer require kclauhk/youtube-downloader "~4.1.2"

Changes in this fork

translated video details (if available) are supported

• To specify the desired language (by YouTube language code)

  $downloadOptions = $youtube->getDownloadLinks($url, ['lang'=>'fr']);

• To specify the desired language and player client

  $downloadOptions = $youtube->getDownloadLinks($url, ['client'=>'android', 'lang'=>'fr']);

(The old way to specify the player client(s) remains valid)

DASH/HLS manifest (available in "visionos", "web" *cookies required, and live streams)

To get the URL of the HLS manifest

$manifestUrl = $downloadOptions->getHlsManifestUrl();

To get the URL of the DASH manifest of live stream with android_vr

$manifestUrl = $downloadOptions->getDashManifestUrl();

(For private/age-restricted videos, fetching the manifest (.m3u8) and MPEG-TS segments requires the same set of cookies)

n/sig deciphering is supported

Deno (an open-source JavaScript runtime) and the PHP exec() function are required. To use this project with Deno, you can either:

• put the Deno binary executable into the "vendor/kclauhk/youtube-downloader/src" directory; or
• specify the directory containing the binary executable by
  $youtube->getJsrt()->setPath('path of the directory');

You may use other JS runtimes. Here are some examples.

Hence, "TVHTML5", which requires n deciphering, is added (client ID: tv) and is set as default client if a JS runtime is available.

player client can be added/modified

The currently available clients are android_vr, tv, visionos, web (Safari user agent) and web_embedded. You can add additional clients/modify the built-in clients by:
$youtube->getApiClients()->setClient($clientId, $context);

• $clientId - ID of the player client
• $context - data in an array of key-value pairs which must contain "clientName" and "clientVersion",
  for example, adding "MWEB":

  $client = array(
      'context' => [
          'client' => [
              'clientName' => 'MWEB',
              'clientVersion' => '2.20260115.01.00',
              'userAgent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 16_7_10 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1',
          ],
      ],
      'client_name' => 2,
      'supports_cookies' => true,
  );
  $youtube->getApiClients()->setClient('mweb', $client);
  $downloadOptions = $youtube->getDownloadLinks($url, 'mweb');    // use 'mweb'

  (client which requires a PO token is not supported)

Changes since v4.1.0

• Two YouTube clients (client ID: "android_vr" and "ios") are built into YouTubeDownloader
  • To specify a player client

    $downloadOptions = $youtube->getDownloadLinks($url, $clientId);

  • $downloadOptions = $youtube->getDownloadLinks($url); will use the default client
• StreamFormat object now contains audioTrack, indexRange and isDrc properties
• YouTubeStreamer accepts custom request headers (this can be used for streaming media from sources that require specific headers)

  $headers = array("origin: $origin", "referer: $referer");
  $youtube->stream($url, $headers);

Example usage

use YouTube\YouTubeDownloader;
use YouTube\Exception\YouTubeException;

$youtube = new YouTubeDownloader();

try {
    $downloadOptions = $youtube->getDownloadLinks("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ");

    if ($downloadOptions->getAllFormats()) {
        echo $downloadOptions->getFirstCombinedFormat()->url;
    } else {
        echo 'No links found';
    }

} catch (YouTubeException $e) {
    echo 'Something went wrong: ' . $e->getMessage();
}

getDownloadLinks method returns a DownloadOptions type object, which holds an array of stream links - some that are audio-only, and some that are both audio and video combined into one.

For typical usage, you are probably interested in dealing with combined streams, for that case, there is the getCombinedFormats method.

Other Features

• Stream YouTube videos directly from your server:

$streamer = new \YouTube\YouTubeStreamer();
$streamer->stream('https://r4---sn-n4v7knll.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?...');

• Pass in your own cookies to YouTubeStreamer

Cookies are needed for accessing stream links of private/age-restricted videos obtained through the web/web_embedded client. Set cookie file before streaming:

$streamer->setCookieFile('./your_cookies.txt');

• Pass in your own cookies/user-agent

If you try downloading private/age-restricted videos, YouTube will ask you to login. The only way to make this work, is to login to your YouTube account in your own web-browser, export those newly set cookies from your browser into a file, and then pass it all to youtube-downloader for use.

$youtube = new YouTubeDownloader();
$youtube->getBrowser()->setCookieFile('./your_cookies.txt');
$youtube->getBrowser()->setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0');

See also:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#how-do-i-pass-cookies-to-youtube-dl

• Before you continue to YouTube...

Depending on your region, you might be force redirected to a page that asks you to agree to Google's cookie policy. You can programmatically agree to those terms, and bypass that warning permanently via consentCookies method on your Browser instance. Example:

$youtube = new YouTubeDownloader();
$youtube->getBrowser()->consentCookies();

How does it work

A more detailed explanation on how to download videos from YouTube will be written soon. For now, there is this:

Athlon1600#25 (comment)

Miscellaneous Links

• https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/plugins/youtube
• https://tyrrrz.me/blog/reverse-engineering-youtube-revisited
• https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/blob/d83787a5ca308c4ca4e86e63a8b63c5e7c4708d6/extractor/src/main/java/org/schabi/newpipe/extractor/services/youtube/extractors/YoutubeStreamExtractor.java
• https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py
• https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

To-do list