Get youtube video duration from URL with bash

Question

How can I get a youtube video duration from it’s URL with bash? Preferably using curl, and without having to mess with authentications and API keys.

If possible, I’d like to know the details (i.e. I think the results are given in json, so maybe a way to get only the duration from that), but getting the duration is the main problem.

Mark Stanislav · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-23 01:49:49Z

2

Well, if you don't want to use the API and would like to use curl, here's a super ugly answer to match :)

Marks-MacBook-Air:~ mstanislav$ curl -s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ |grep '<meta itemprop="duration"'
<meta itemprop="duration" content="PT3M33S">

The PT3M33S means 3 minutes and 33 seconds, which is the duration. Just process the data from there (via shell script or otherwise you're using curl with). Be kind voters, just answering the question as requested ;)

For the sake of everything happy, here's using curl with the API, which, does not require a developer key unless you are uploading or writing data.

curl -s 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/dQw4w9WgXcQ?v=2&alt=jsonc'

edited Mar 23, 2013 at 1:49

answered Mar 23, 2013 at 1:32

Mark Stanislav

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3 Comments

user137369 Over a year ago

I don’t exactly have anything against the API, but from what I saw it seems that I’d need to register the app to get a key, and that’s too much hassle for such a simple task (if I’m wrong in this regard, you can share the answer with the API if you prefer). It’s not that ugly, it works as intended. It’s not blazing fast, but it’ll do very well. Thank you.

Mark Stanislav Over a year ago

Updated with sane way, using API. As I state there, no API key needed for just a simple video query. Look for 'duration' which is in seconds. Enjoy!

user137369 Over a year ago

Ironically enough, the “ugly” way is safer. Since youtube urls don’t always follow the same scheme (eg, lists), getting the video ID can be tricky, which makes the first way more fool‐proof.

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