vidpickr

Official Python SDK for the VidPickr API. Download YouTube videos with a single function call.

from vidpickr import VidPickr

vp = VidPickr(api_key="vpk_live_...")
vp.download(
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    out="video.mp4",
    quality=1080,
)

That's it. The SDK:

1. Resolves the URL through /api/v1/info
2. Picks the best 1080p video track and the highest-bitrate audio track
3. Exchanges the merge token via /api/v1/split_token
4. Streams both tracks in parallel from /api/v1/stream
5. Muxes them into one MP4 with ffmpeg -c copy (no re-encoding)
6. Writes the result to video.mp4 and cleans up temp files

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• A VidPickr Plus subscription ($1/mo) and an API key, minted at vidpickr.com/account/api-keys
• ffmpeg on PATH — or use the bundled-ffmpeg extra below

Install

pip install vidpickr

If you don't have ffmpeg installed system-wide and don't want to:

pip install 'vidpickr[bundled-ffmpeg]'

That pulls imageio-ffmpeg, which ships a pre-built ffmpeg binary inside the wheel (~50 MB extra disk).

API

VidPickr(api_key, *, base_url=None, session=None)

Construct the client. session accepts a requests.Session if you want to share connection pooling or pin a User-Agent.

vp.download(url, *, out, quality='best', video_codec=None, on_progress=None) -> str

Resolve, stream, mux, and write to disk. Returns the output path.

Argument	Type	Default	Description
out	str	—	Output MP4 path. Parent directory must exist.
quality	'best' | 'highest' | 'lowest' | int	'best'	Target height (e.g. 1080) or preset.
video_codec	'av1' | 'vp9' | 'avc' | 'hevc' | None	None	Preferred codec when multiple are available at the same height.
on_progress	Callable[[dict], None] | None	None	Called between phases with {"phase": ..., "video_bytes": ..., ...}.

vp.info(url) -> dict

Resolve only. Returns the VideoInfo JSON. Use when you want to inspect formats before deciding.

vp.raw

Access the low-level VidPickrClient for custom pipelines (e.g. piping audio bytes into Whisper without writing to disk).

Errors

from vidpickr import APIError, FFmpegMissingError, NoFormatError

try:
    vp.download(url, out="x.mp4")
except APIError as e:
    if e.code == "rate_limited":
        print(f"Retry in {e.retry_after}s")
    elif e.code == "plus_required":
        print("Subscribe to Plus first.")
    else:
        raise
except FFmpegMissingError as e:
    print(e)  # tells you exactly how to install ffmpeg
except NoFormatError as e:
    print(f"Requested format unavailable: {e}")

Subtitles

info = vp.info(url)
en_track = next(s for s in info["subtitles"] if s["code"] == "en" and not s["is_auto"])
srt = vp.raw.subtitle(en_track["download_token"], fmt="srt")
with open("captions.srt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(srt)

Why no Rust extension yet?

The 0.1.0 release uses ffmpeg as a subprocess — fastest path to a working SDK. A future release will ship a tiny Rust extension via PyO3 for in-process MP4 muxing, dropping the ffmpeg dependency entirely (target install footprint ~500 KB instead of 50 MB).

License

MIT