How to scrape data off videos?

Question

I am interested in writing a program that

1. Opens up an input video file from either youtube or twitch

2. Play the video and use image recognition to get information about the video

Could anyone point me in good directions to learn more about this topic? I'm trying to figure out these kinds of things :

• How can I download the video data? Does youtube have an API for this? I know there are websites that let you put in a video url and download the video. I'd like to know how they do this.
• Once I get the data, how can I "play" it and take snapshots of it in small intervals? What libraries would be best for this?
• Any good image recognition libraries?
• Recommended languages?

This is an approach I'm currently thinking of:

I've currently manually downloaded a bunch of video files I'm interested in. They are in .flv format. I could programatically play the video full screen, continuously print screen to capture the image every x seconds, and run image recognition on those images. But I'm curious if there is a less naive approach.

Answer 1

Why do it manually, you could create a program (in any language C#, Java etc), which gets the youtube/vimeo video link, downloads it/extracts screens, and use any of the Image recognition libraries available out there ? (AForge is good...)

I don't see much complication in there...

Probably you can even avoid making your program to download the entire video, but could get the thumbnail from the streaming video link.