Fast YouTube Video Downloader Chrome Extension

It has been a while since I have written anything here but I have been super busy working on a bunch of projects. I have been messing around with a lot of HTML5 and canvas and YouTube. I never understood why these "YouTube video download websites" use back-end code to download videos when everything is available on the front-end. Same thing applies to the actual YouTube website. For example, if you are watching a YouTube video (it has to be queued up or playing) you can run this in your console and get the url paths to all the different video files available: yt.player.playerReferences_.player1.api.getVideoData().url_encoded_fmt_stream_map

But, you don't even have to do that because the embed tag that has the video, its flashvar attribute, also has the url_encoded_fmt_stream_map data. It needs to be decoded, a couple of times, but after that you have all the urls to the video files that you need. So, I decided to write a chrome extension that is really fast, simple and user friendly: Fast YouTube Downloader Chrome Extension

Here is how it works: you go to any YouTube video, and you click on the YouTube Downloader Extension in Chrome which will put a link on the page that takes you to the best quality version of the video file. I only show a link to the highest quality format because who cares about low quality if you are downloading the YouTube video to your computer? If you do care, let me know, and I can provide all the links. Here is the extension, just a couple of lines in JavaScript:


YouTube DL

UPDATE: New version of YouTube Video Downloader below does not require a double-click and it will right away open a new tab with the HQ youtube video for download.

YouTube DL