VideoBot

A smart desktop video scraper built with Python, PyQt6, Playwright, and yt-dlp.

VideoBot crawls listing/gallery pages, follows each item to its detail page, downloads the video, waits 5 seconds (always), then moves on — page after page until you tell it to stop.

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Features

• Dual-engine download
  • yt-dlp handles YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter/X, TikTok, Dailymotion, Reddit, and 1000+ other platforms automatically
  • Playwright direct extraction falls back for sites with raw <video> tags, MP4/WebM links, og:video meta, JSON-LD VideoObject, and data-* attributes
• Smart two-phase crawler — JS scoring heuristic finds item page links on listing/gallery pages, same approach as ScrapeBot
• Quality selector — Best, 1080p, 720p, 480p, or Worst
• Format preference — MP4, WebM, or Any
• Respectful rate limiting — hardcoded 5-second wait after every download, never skipped
• File validation — rejects files under 100 KB
• Unlimited pagination — auto-clicks next page until max pages reached or Stop pressed
• Dark desktop UI — live stat cards, scrolling log, progress bar

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Setup

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• ffmpeg (for merging video+audio tracks from YouTube etc.)

  brew install ffmpeg
  

Install

git clone https://github.com/Shadowfetchapps/videobot.git
cd videobot
pip install -r requirements.txt
playwright install chromium

Run

python run.py

macOS app

VideoBot.app runs run.py from the folder it sits in, so it works from any clone location. It uses .venv/bin/python3 in the repo folder if that exists, otherwise python3 from your login shell, and it runs run.py with your login-shell PATH, so Homebrew tools such as ffmpeg are on the PATH. Set up the venv once:

cd videobot
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/playwright install chromium

Then double-click VideoBot.app in the repo folder. Keep the app inside the repo folder; it looks for run.py next to itself. Output goes to ~/Library/Logs/VideoBot.log. If Python or the requirements are missing, the app shows a dialog with the setup commands.

The app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized. A git clone launches directly. If you downloaded the repo as a ZIP, macOS blocks the first launch: right-click the app and choose Open (on macOS 15 and later, try to open it once, then click Open Anyway in System Settings > Privacy & Security), or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine VideoBot.app in the repo folder.

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Usage

1. Paste a listing or gallery URL into Start URL
   • Works with YouTube channels/playlists, Vimeo showcases, video grid sites, etc.
2. Choose a Save To folder (defaults to ~/Downloads/VideoBot)
3. Select Quality and Format
4. Set Max Pages — ∞ Unlimited runs until you click Stop
5. Click ▶ Start Scraping

Stat cards

Card	What it counts
Listing Pages	Gallery/listing pages crawled
Items Visited	Individual item URLs followed
Videos Saved	Files actually downloaded

Log panel

Shows real-time progress: page URLs, item URLs, yt-dlp messages, download results, 5-second delay countdowns, and final totals.

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How it works

Phase 1 — Find item links (listing page)

Playwright loads the gallery page and runs a JS scoring heuristic over every <a> tag:

Signal	Points
Wraps <img> or <video>	+6
Inside a card/grid/feed container	+4
URL path contains /video/, /watch/, /clip/, etc.	+3
URL contains ?v=	+3
Has aria-label or title attribute	+1 each

Links scoring ≥ 4 are collected. The next-page URL is found via rel="next", class-name heuristics, and text content (Next, ›, »).

Phase 2 — Download each item

For every item URL, VideoBot tries two strategies in order:

A. yt-dlp — attempts to extract and download using the selected quality/format. Handles platform authentication cookies, HLS streams, DASH, and format merging via ffmpeg.

B. Playwright direct extraction — opens the page and scans for video sources using 6 strategies:

1. <video src> and <video><source src>
2. og:video / og:video:secure_url meta tags
3. JSON-LD VideoObject with contentUrl
4. <a href> links ending in .mp4, .webm, .mkv, etc.
5. data-video-url, data-src, data-stream, etc.
6. YouTube/Vimeo <iframe> embed URLs

After every successful download a 5-second delay is enforced before moving to the next item.

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Supported formats

Format	Extensions
MP4	.mp4, .m4v
WebM	.webm
Matroska	.mkv
QuickTime	.mov
AVI	.avi
Flash Video	.flv
Windows Media	.wmv
MPEG	.mpeg, .mpg
Mobile	.3gp, .ogv

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Notes

• yt-dlp must be installed and ffmpeg must be on your PATH for best results
• Some sites require being logged in — yt-dlp supports --cookies-from-browser for this (add to ydl_opts in scraper.py)
• Private or age-gated content will require browser cookies; this is not configured by default
• VideoBot respects the 5-second rule even across page turns — it never batches or skips the delay

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Project structure

videobot/
├── videobot/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── app.py        # PyQt6 dark UI
│   ├── worker.py     # QThread background worker
│   └── scraper.py    # SmartVideoScraper (yt-dlp + Playwright)
├── VideoBot.app      # Double-clickable macOS launcher
├── requirements.txt
├── run.py
└── README.md

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License

MIT. See LICENSE.