Video downloader

Decodo Video downloader (target: youtube_video) can be used to download and save specified Youtube videos into the s3 compatible storage.

youtube_video

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• The youtube_video target only supports asynchronous and batch integrations.
• Batch youtube_video requests are limited to 100 video per request.
• Downloading is supported for videos of 3 hours or less.
• The download time is limited to 1 hour.

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To get access or learn more, please Contact our sales team

Download a YouTube video into an Amazon S3-compatible storage location.

{
    "target": "youtube_video",
    "query": "cSBFq2OClis",
    "upload_url": "https://access_key:[email protected]/video-folder"
}

Delivery to S3

You can download videos straight into your S3 bucket by providing a number of arguments through the upload_url parameter. In the steps below, we will upload a sample video into a new bucket.

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If you have the option, we recommend creating a new bucket for video downloads. That said, the following steps will also work on an existing bucket.

In order to start downloading videos:

1. Create a new S3 bucket with default setup and permissions.

2. Create a new IAM user.

3. Attach the PutObject permission for your bucket on the IAM user:

   1. Add an inline policy:

      

   2. Under Service, select S3.

   3. Under Actions:

      1. The following permissions need to be added to the bucket:
         • GetBucketLocation
      2. Thew following permissions need to be added to the folder of the bucket:
         • PutObject
         • PutObjectAcl

   4. Under Resources, select Specific, click on Add ARN, add your bucket name and your video folder name:

      

   5. Your final policy statement should look like this:

      {
      	"Version": "2012-10-17",
      	"Statement": [
      		{
      			"Sid": "Statement01",
      			"Effect": "Allow",
      			"Action": "s3:GetBucketLocation"
      			"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket"
      		},
      		{
      			"Sid": "Statement02",
      			"Effect": "Allow",
      			"Action": [
      				"s3:PutObject",
      				"s3:PutObjectAcl"
      			],
      			"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket/*"
      		}
      	]
      }

4. Generate an access key and secret for that user.

   1. When asked for use case, select Other.

   🚧

   The access key sent to Scraper API cannot include any non URI-escaped characters that may conflict with the upload_url parameter, such as / or @.

   If your key generated by AWS includes such characters, please regenerate your key.

5. Call Scraper API with the following sample parameters:

{
    "target": "youtube_video",
    "query": "PFRn5zKJTD8",
    "upload_url": "https://access_key:[email protected]/video-folder"
}

Things to note:

• access_key and access_secret are generated from step 4.
• us-west-2 is used as a sample region, your AWS region may be different.
• A /video-folder must be provided.

S3-compatible providers

Bellow are a number of S3-compatible providers that will also work with this target out of the box:

• MinIO
• Wasabi
• DigitalOcean Spaces
• Backblaze B2
• Scaleway Object Storage
• Linode Object Storage
• IBM Cloud Object Storage
• Oracle Cloud Object Storage
• Hetzner Cloud Storage

Sample request

curl --request 'POST' \
        --url 'https://scraper-api.decodo.com/v2/task' \
        --header 'Accept: application/json' \
        --header 'Authorization: Basic USERNAME:PASSWORD' \ // update with base64encode(username:password)
        --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
        --data '
    {
      "target": "youtube_video",
      "query": "PFRn5zKJTD8",
      "upload_url": "https://storage_username:[email protected]/video-folder"
    }
'

A successfully queued job will return a response similar to this:

{
    "target": "youtube_video",
    "query": "PFRn5zKJTD8",
    "page_from": 1,
    "limit": 10,
    "geo": null,
    "device_type": "desktop",
    "headless": null,
    "parse": false,
    "locale": null,
    "domain": "com",
    "output_schema": null,
    "created_at": "2025-07-01 11:09:53",
    "id": "7345770621134969857",
    "status": "pending",
    "content_encoding": "utf-8",
    "updated_at": "2025-07-01 11:09:53",
    "force_headers": false,
    "force_cookies": false,
    "headers_cookies_policy": false,
    "media": "audio_video",
    "quality": "720"
}

Accessing geo-restricted videos

Scraper API attempts to automatically pick the best location from where to download geo-restricted videos. However, YouTube videos do not expose information about what geolocation a given video is restricted to, therefore, Scraper API may fail after a fixed number of attempts. Manually retrying the scraping request may be required.

Monitoring progress

The status of a queued video download can be checked through the /v2/task/:id/results endpoint (you can find id in the body of the response after the task has been created):

• HTTP status code 204 indicates that the download is still processing.
• HTTP status code 200 indicates that the download has finished and an attempt to upload to your storage direction has been made.

🚧

Scraper API does not currently support:

• Showing download progress (completed/remaining percent)
• Indicating when uploading to upload_url fails (invalid credentials, bucket not found, etc.)

Requests are still charged even if the upload to upload_url fails - we recommend testing with small videos first.