I wrote a simple Python script youtube-video-info to dump any information of a YouTube video. It does more than I wanted. Using videos.list to retrieve any data the API can provide, you can view a sample output on the Gist.

It can list multiple videos and any combination of parts from the following list:

  • id
  • snippet
  • contentDetails
  • fileDetails
  • liveStreamingDetails
  • player
  • processingDetails
  • recordingDetails
  • statistics
  • status
  • suggestions
  • topicDetails

Default are snippet, contentDetails, player, statistics, and status. If you include some parts which require authorization, you can use --auth to authorize this script to access the private data, a yt.dat credential file would be created if successful.

For example:

./youtube-video-info -a \
  -p snippet fileDetails status suggestions -- ID1 ID2 ID3

Note that -- is used to indicate the end of parts.

The output format isn’t easy to read, because I only wanted to grab the thumbnail URL, so I could use image instead of embedding a Flash in my blog posts, therefore simple sections with prettyprint is all it does.