For me there are generally 3 steps to the process of watching a youtube video. 1. Get the video id. Retrieve HTML containing youtube /watch?v= urls or other urls that contain the video id. Extract the urls from the HTML or other markup garbage. 2. Retrieve the video. Feed the /watch?v= url to a script that does some "find and replace" on the absurdly long googlevideo urls. Below I have given an example of such a scri…
holy crap that is convoluted I simply use mplayer and javascript oneliner extracting direct mp4 link from YouTubeCenter plugin = streaming video in mplayer without downloading.
A: "holy crap that is convuluted"
I do not use Python nor a Javascript-enabled web browser to download video.
Both are big, convoluted, slow(!) and unnecessary.
But I do agree with using mplayer for playback.