YouTube Shorts Downloader (Fast & Lightweight)

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[!IMPORTANT] Shorts-Only Enforcement: This Actor is engineered specifically for YouTube Shorts ($\le 180$ seconds, vertical format). Non-Shorts and standard full-length videos ($> 180$s or horizontal 16:9 videos) are automatically rejected prior to downloading to safeguard your Apify compute credits.

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🚀 Key Features

• ⚡ Ultra-Low Resource Usage: Runs on just 256 MB of RAM without headless browsers, consuming minimal compute credits per run.
• 🎯 Pure Shorts Focus: Pre-inspects video length and aspect ratio, skipping non-shorts before data transfer starts.
• 📦 Direct MP4 Downloads: Automatically saves videos to Apify's Key-Value Store (SHORT_<id>.mp4) with permanent direct download URLs.
• 📊 Comprehensive Metadata: Extracts channel data, view count, like count, comment count, duration, upload date, and thumbnail links into the default Dataset.
• 🔄 Lossless Stream Remuxing: Leverages fast ffmpeg stream remuxing (-c copy) without re-encoding, processing short-form videos in 2–5 seconds.
• 🛡️ Apify Proxy Ready: Integrated proxy support for handling restricted or rate-limited regions.

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🏗️ Architecture & Execution Flow

flowchart TD
    A["User Input (Shorts URLs)"] --> B["URL Normalization & Validation"]
    B --> C{"Pre-Download Check"}
    C -->|"Duration > 180s or Landscape"| D["Skip Video & Log Reason"]
    D --> E["Push Skipped Status to Dataset"]
    C -->|"Valid Short (<=180s)"| F["Fast Stream Download (yt-dlp)"]
    F --> G["Stream Copy Remuxing (ffmpeg)"]
    G --> H["Save .mp4 to Key-Value Store"]
    H --> I["Push Metadata & Direct URL to Dataset"]
    I --> J["Cleanup Temporary Media"]

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💰 Credit & Resource Optimization

Compute units on Apify are billed by $\text{Memory (GB)} \times \text{Duration (hours)}$. Most scrapers spin up resource-heavy headless browsers (Chromium/Playwright) demanding 1 GB to 4 GB of RAM.

Runner Setup	Memory Allocated	Relative Compute Units Cost	Average Speed / Short
YouTube Shorts Downloader (This Actor)	256 MB	1x (Lowest Possible)	~3 seconds
Standard Puppeteer Scraper	1024 MB	4x	~12 seconds
Playwright Full Browser Actor	2048 MB	8x	~18 seconds
Heavy Multi-Tab Scraper	4096 MB	16x	~30 seconds

[!TIP] Because this Actor operates with direct HTTP stream retrieval and zero video re-encoding, you can download hundreds of Shorts for mere cents in platform credits.

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⚙️ Input Configuration

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
shortsUrls	array	[]	List of YouTube Shorts URLs (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/...).
quality	string	"best"	Target video resolution: best, 1080p, 720p, 480p, or audio_only.
saveVideoToKeyValueStore	boolean	true	When true, uploads the MP4 directly into Apify's Key-Value Store.
includeMetadata	boolean	true	Includes full metadata (views, likes, author, duration) in Dataset.
proxyConfiguration	object	{ "useApifyProxy": false }	Optional Apify Proxy configuration.

Sample JSON Input

{
  "shortsUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k9nKjQzHh6Q"
  ],
  "quality": "best",
  "saveVideoToKeyValueStore": true,
  "includeMetadata": true
}

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📤 Output Data

Every processed video produces a record in the default Dataset:

{
  "id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
  "duration": 58,
  "uploader": "Rick Astley",
  "uploaderId": "@RickAstleyYT",
  "uploaderUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@RickAstleyYT",
  "viewCount": 24500000,
  "likeCount": 1820000,
  "commentCount": 42000,
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "uploadDate": "20231015",
  "downloadUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<STORE_ID>/records/SHORT_dQw4w9WgXcQ.mp4",
  "fileSizeMb": 8.42,
  "status": "SUCCESS"
}

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🛠️ Local Development & CLI

# Clone or navigate to the directory
cd /root/youtube-shorts-downloader

# Validate Actor schemas
apify validate-schema

# Run Actor in cloud
apify call fire_dev/youtube-shorts-downloader -i '{"shortsUrls":["https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID"]}'

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