I need to figure out the simplest method of grabbing the length of a youtube video programmatically given the url of said video.
Is the youtube API the best method? It looks somewhat complicated and I've never used it before so it's likely to take me a bit to get accommodated, but I really just want the quickest solution. I took a glance through the source of a video page in the hopes it might list it there, but apparently it does not (though it lists recommended video times in a very nice list that would be easy to parse). If it is the best method, does anyone have a snippit?
Ideally I could get this done in Python, and I need it to ultimately be in the format of
00:00:00.000
but I'm completely open to any solutions anyone may have.
I'd appreciate any insight.
All you have to do is read the seconds attribute in the yt:duration element from the XML returned by Youtube API 2.0. You only end up with seconds resolution (no milliseconds yet). Here's an example:
from datetime import timedelta
from urllib2 import urlopen
from xml.dom.minidom import parseString
for vid in ('wJ4hPaNyHnY', 'dJ38nHlVE78', 'huXaL8qj2Vs'):
url = 'https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/{0}?v=2'.format(vid)
s = urlopen(url).read()
d = parseString(s)
e = d.getElementsByTagName('yt:duration')[0]
a = e.attributes['seconds']
v = int(a.value)
t = timedelta(seconds=v)
print(t)
And the output is:
0:00:59
0:02:24
0:04:49