How to download YouTube videos?

ContextMiner allows one to collect all sorts of data from a number of sources, including YouTube. However, due to technical and legal issues, it does not let one download YouTube videos directly on our servers. But now you can do it very easily! We have made it possible to connect your ContextMiner campaign and download the videos on your client.

Requirements: PHP 5 or higher, Python 2.4 or higher, youtube-dl. Note: we have tested this on UNIX machines (Linux, Mac OS X), but it should be possible to use it on a PC as well, given you have the right tools listed here.

Once you have the above setup, follow these simple steps. The flash videos from YouTube will be downloaded to your hard drive locally.

1. Download a client-side PHP script from here. Save it and change the ".txt" extension to ".php".
2. Note down your personal code. This is available from My ContextMiner page and remains the same for all your campaigns.
3. Find out the campaign number of the campaign that you want to use for downloading the videos. You can get this when you view campaigns.
4. Given that you have PHP, Python, and youtube-dl script on your system, run "php downloadYTVideosClient.php <campaign_number> <code>" at your command line. By default, the flash videos will be stored in the current directory. You can change this path by altering '$ytdlLocation' variable in the PHP script.

Need more clarification or help? Contact us.