Get a YouTube video URL in PHP

[JmZ]

Quick piece of code that should, in theory, fetch the FLV/MP4/whatever URL of the video, given a youtube URL.

The example has a hard-coded url, turn it into a function to make it a parameter instead.

Also, it has absolutely no error checking, so you may wanna implement that (e.g. you should check if $r returns false and, if so, throw an error and die).

$c = curl_init();
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRLz4aDCAs0');
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
$r = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);

preg_match_all('#url_encoded_fmt_stream_map=([^&]+)#', $r, $fvars);
$fvars = explode('&', urldecode($fvars[1][0]));

$results = array();
$resultIndex = -1;

foreach($fvars as $item)
{
    if(strpos($item, 'url=') !== false)
        $resultIndex++;
    if(!isset($results[$resultIndex]))
        $results[$resultIndex] = array();
    if(strpos($item, 'url=') === false)
    {
        $parse = explode('=', $item);
        $results[$resultIndex][$parse[0]] = urldecode($parse[1]);
        continue;
    }
    $parse = preg_match('#url=(.+)$#', $item, $url);
    $results[$resultIndex]['url'] = urldecode($url[1]);
}

var_dump($results); 

This results in an array containing arrays like so:

  array(5) {
    ["url"]=>
    string(419) "some_youtube_url"
    ["quality"]=>
    string(5) "small"
    ["fallback_host"]=>
    string(26) "tc.v4.cache5.c.youtube.com"
    ["type"]=>
    string(11) "video/x-flv"
    ["itag"]=>
    string(1) "5"
  }

Just an example anyway, there may be an easier way to do it but this seemed logical at the time.

JmZ Reviewed by JmZ on 19th Nov 2011. Get a YouTube video URL in PHP Quick piece of code that should, in theory, fetch the FLV/MP4/whatever URL of the video, given a youtube URL. The example has a hard-coded url, turn it into a function to make it a parameter instead. Also, it has absolutely no error checking, so you may wanna implement that (e.g. you should check if $r returns false and, if so, throw an error and die). $c = curl_init(); curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRLz4aDCAs0'); curl_setopt($c, Rating: 5