YouTube Video/Audio Downloader (Optimized)

A professional, high-performance Apify Actor to download videos or audio from YouTube. Built for speed and reliability, it utilizes software for accelerated downloads and Apify Residential Proxies to minimize bot detection and bypass geographical restrictions.

🚀 Features

• High Speed: Multiple concurrent connections for maximum bandwidth utilization.
• Bot Protection: Automatically rotates Apify Residential Proxies with per-attempt session management.
• Flexible Formats: Download as high-quality video (MP4) or audio (MP3).
• Resolution Control: Supports qualities from 360p up to 4K (2160p).
• Robustness: Advanced retry logic with exponential backoff and automatic proxy rotation on failure.
• Metadata Aware: Automatically sanitizes filenames and handles Shorts, Live streams, and regular videos.

📥 Input Parameters

Field	Type	Description	Default
startUrls	Array	List of YouTube video URLs to download.	Required
downloadType	String	Choose between video or audio.	video
quality	String	Preferred video quality (e.g., 720p, 1080p, 2160p).	720p

📊 Output Data Structure

The Actor produces a dataset where each item represents a download result:

{
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "downloadUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/...",
  "format": "VIDEO",
  "resolution": "720p",
  "status": "SUCCESS"
}

• downloadUrl: A public link to the file stored in the Actor's Key-Value Store.
• status: Either SUCCESS or FAILED.

⚙️ How it Works

1. Proxy Rotation: For every download attempt, a new session ID is generated for the Apify Proxy, ensuring a fresh residential IP.
2. Download Execution: The Actor uses youtube download mechanism more faster then normal.
3. Storage: Files are temporarily saved, then uploaded to the default Key-Value Store and made publicly accessible.
4. Error Handling: The Actor detects common blocks (like "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot") and network issues, triggering an immediate proxy switch and retry.

💰 What you pay for

Downloading runs through residential proxies, and that traffic is the real cost of this Actor, so it is billed by how many megabytes a run actually pulls.

Event	When it is charged
Actor start	Once per run.
Result	Once per row written to the dataset.
100 MB proxy usage	The first 10 MB of every run are free. Past that, each started 100 MB of downloaded data is one unit.

What that means in practice:

• Metadata only (skipDownload: true) — nothing is downloaded, so no proxy usage is billed at all.
• A single MP3 — a few megabytes, comfortably inside the free allowance.
• A 45 MB video — 45 MB total, still one 100 MB unit after the allowance is applied.
• A 260 MB video — 250 MB billable, so three units.

Every run logs its own figure, so you can check the bill against the traffic:

Data usage: 22.17 MB total, 1 billable unit(s) (first 10 MB free)

💡 Notes

• Acceleration: Significant speed improvements for larger files.
• Residential Proxies: Highly recommended for stable scraping and downloading from YouTube.
• Key-Value Store: Results are kept in the Actor's storage. You can access them via the provided downloadUrl.
• Failed lookups: If YouTube blocks every attempt for a URL, that row comes back with status: "FAILED" and an error message rather than an empty SUCCESS row.

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Developed with focus on performance and reliability.