189.7k stars · Unlicense · 2026.08.19 (2026-08-19) · Track this in Scout
Whole-channel YouTube metadata as JSON — titles, tags, thumbnails, subtitles, upload dates — with no API key or quota.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
The command-line downloader for YouTube and several thousand other sites. It fetches video, audio-only tracks, subtitles, thumbnails and, most usefully here, the complete metadata for a video or an entire channel as JSON: title, description, tags, chapters, duration, upload date, view count.
What it is good for. Edition 5 covered youtube-transcript-api for transcripts and called it the cheapest content research that exists. This is the layer underneath it, and it is cheaper still. One command with --flat-playlist --dump-json over a competitor's channel gives you every video they have ever published as a row of structured data — no API key, none of the 10,000-unit daily quota that constrains python-youtube. That is the raw table for two questions that are otherwise guesswork: which topics in a niche get made most often, and which of them get made well. Add --write-thumbnail and you can lay the top fifty thumbnails out as a contact sheet, which is the fastest education available in the single variable that most affects whether YouTube shows a video to a stranger. It also archives a back catalogue of your own, which is the backup nobody makes until something disappears.
- Unlicense on the source, no key, no quota, no consent screen — and a project that will still be maintained in five years
--dump-jsonalone is a research database with no code written; hand the file to Claude and ask what nobody has covered properly- Metadata, subtitles and thumbnails come out of the same command, so one run produces material for titles, topics and design
- YouTube blocks datacentre IP ranges aggressively. Run it from a local machine, not a rented server — exactly the caution Edition 5 gave for youtube-transcript-api
- Downloading other people's video for private research is one thing; republishing any of it is another, and the line matters
- The pre-built standalone executables bundle GPLv3+ code. Use the plain
pip installif anything built with it might ever ship
pip install yt-dlp
