YouTube Video Downloader & Persistent Media Storage API

This Actor is a professional-grade YouTube video downloader API and managed media pipeline. It allows you to download YouTube videos and audio, extract high-quality streams, and host the resulting files in high-performance cloud storage. Whether you need a 1080p MP4, a high-fidelity FLAC audio track, or a permanent archive, this tool provides a standalone, API-first solution for media processing.

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Why use this YouTube Downloader?

• Prevent Link Expiration: Standard download links typically expire in 30 minutes. Use our Persistent Storage to keep files accessible for up to a year.
• Automated Media Pipelines: Streamline the conversion of YouTube content into high-quality formats for apps, podcasts, or internal databases.
• High-Speed Delivery: Files are served from optimized cloud infrastructure, ensuring fast download speeds for your end-users.
• Bulk Content Extraction: Provide dozens of URLs at once and let the Actor handle the concurrent processing and storage.
• No Infrastructure Management: Offload heavy video processing and storage maintenance to a reliable, serverless solution.

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🌟 Key Features

This YouTube downloader API acts as a dedicated media pipeline with advanced capabilities:

• 🎬 Multi-Resolution Video: Save videos in 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and Full 4K (2160p).
• 🎵 Professional Audio Extraction: Convert content into MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, WebM, AAC, Opus, OGG, Vorbis, or WAV.
• ⏳ Managed Persistent Storage: Keep your files accessible long-term. Choose a storage duration (TTL) from 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, up to 5 years.
• 🗣️ Multi-Language Audio Support: Specify a 2-letter language code (e.g., es, fr, en) to download specific audio tracks for videos with multiple languages.
• 📦 "All Formats" Mode (Default): Retrieve every available technical specification and raw stream link for a video in a single request.
• ⚡ Parallel Batch Processing: Built for scale. The Actor processes YouTube URLs in managed parallel batches to ensure 100% stability and resource control, even for large video files.

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🧩 Step‑by‑step: How to download YouTube videos with this Actor

1. Open the Actor on Apify and go to the Input tab.
2. Paste one or more YouTube video / Shorts / Music URLs into the urls field.
3. Select your desired Download Format.
   • Note: "All formats" provides raw links but does not support persistent storage.
4. (Optional) Set Persistent Storage duration if you want the file to stay accessible beyond 30 minutes.
5. (Optional) Set an Audio Track Language code for videos with multiple tracks.
6. Click Run and, when finished, download your results from the Dataset tab.

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💰 Pricing & Monetization

This Actor uses a transparent pricing model based on compute usage and a specialized storage billing system.

How much does it cost?

• Standard Extractions: You pay for the time the Actor is active, processing and transferring your videos.
• Storage Usage (MB-Days): For persistent storage, we use a specialized MB-Day model.

What is an MB-Day? An MB-Day is defined as 1 Megabyte of data stored for 1 Day.

• 100MB video stored for 1 day = 100 Units
• 100MB video stored for 1 week = 700 Units
• 50MB video stored for 30 days = 1500 Units

This ensures you only pay for exactly what you use. Check the Monetization tab for the current price per unit.

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📥 Input

Key input fields (see the Input tab for the full schema):

• urls (array, required): One or more YouTube video / Shorts / Music URLs.
• format (string, required): Target format or resolution (e.g. 1080, mp3, all).
• ttl (string, optional): Storage duration (e.g. 1d, 1w, 1m, 1y, 5y).
• languageCode (string, optional): 2-letter language code for specific audio tracks (e.g. en, es).

Input example

{
  "urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z19HM7ANZlo"],
  "format": "1080",
  "ttl": "1w",
  "languageCode": "en"
}

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📤 Output

The Actor stores results in a dataset. You can download them as JSON, CSV, HTML, or Excel from the Dataset tab.

What data can this YouTube downloader API return?

Field	Description
jobId	A unique identifier for the specific download task.
videoId	The parsed YouTube Video ID.
title	The full title of the video.
originalUrl	The original YouTube URL provided as input.
storageUrl	A non-expiring link to the file in our managed storage (if enabled).
downloadUrl	A temporary, direct download link (expires in ~30 min).
fileSizeMB	The exact size of the processed file in Megabytes.
ttl	The storage duration selected (e.g., 1w, 1m).
expiresAt	The timestamp when the file will be removed from storage.
status	Current status of the job (completed, failed).

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💡 Tips & Troubleshooting

• Format Availability: While you can request a specific resolution (like 4K), if that resolution is not available for the specific video, the tool will provide the best available match.
• Processing Time: High-quality (4K/1440p) and very long videos take significantly more time to process.
• Success Rate: Extremely long videos (e.g., 2+ hours) or ultra-high-quality files have a higher chance of failure due to the complexity of the extraction process.
• Persistent Storage: Remember that "All formats" mode only returns metadata and temporary links. If you need a permanent URL, select a specific Video or Audio format and a Storage TTL.

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🔗 Related YouTube Tools

Build a complete YouTube data pipeline by using this downloader alongside these specialized tools:

• YouTube Search Scraper: Discover content, scrape search results, playlists, and channel metadata.
• YouTube Comments Scraper: Extract thousands of comments for sentiment analysis and audience research.

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❓ FAQ & Support

Is it legal to download YouTube videos?

Our scrapers are ethical and do not extract any private user data. They only extract what the user has chosen to share publicly. We believe that our scrapers, when used for ethical purposes by Apify users, are safe. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data protected by GDPR or other regulations. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason. Read more on the legality of web scraping.

Can I choose where my videos are hosted?

No. To ensure maximum speed and stability, all videos are hosted on our optimized, managed cloud infrastructure. This allows us to provide reliable, high-speed links to your applications.

Support

If you encounter issues, have feature requests, or find a bug, please use the Issues tab on the Actor's detail page. We actively monitor feedback to ensure our video pipeline remains the most reliable on the market.