I’ve whipped up this little YouTube video grabber for myself and I’ve opened it up for the moment. If I see it getting spammed or abused in some way, I’ll probably password protect it, nevertheless, you can check it out here.

What it does

This little app takes a YouTube video link and then adds the reference in a database. A seperate script then polls that database and looks for new URLs. It then uses another script (that I did not write), called yt-download, to fetch each video and dump it to my fileserver.

How it does it

I wrote this application using Django (and therefore Python). Django provides a lot of really helpful database abstraction along with various helpful tools for custom web administration of databases and tools for rapidly created very presentations.. I’m sure a true Django expert would say it’s even more yet.

In addition to Django, my little application runs on an Ubuntu Linux based webserver I run as a Virtual Machine.

The actual fetching of the videos is handled by a script I wrote that uses the Django database framework.. It’s just a few lines and is called by cron.

What it can do for you

Granted people don’t abuse this thing, I don’t mind them submitting videos for the purpose of getting at the mp4 links on the video pages. Of course you can also use it to point me to content that you think is awesome.