Many libraries have been written to pull things off Youtube. This is one of them.

Installation

The usual: gem install downthetube

then put it in your Gemfile if you are doing Rails stuff with it:

gem 'downthetube'

Usage:

In irb you need to do the requires:
require 'rubygems'
require 'downthetube'

And then play. I've tried to make it do what you would expect:

  Youtube::Playlist.new("76E01802262A6694")
  playlists = Youtube.playlists_for "stephensam"
  playlists.first.title # "Capoeira Angola"
  vids = playlists.first.videos 2
  vid = vids.last
  vid.title # "Mestre Jogo De Dentro e Mestra Tisza,Ilheus 2008"
  vid.description # "Roda de fim de ano na praca de Ilheus 2008,gravado por CM Denis."
  vid.url # "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I_4JgV-y8s"
  vid.thumbnail(:large) # "http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4I_4JgV-y8s/hqdefault.jpg"

LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Copyright © 2011 Mike Williamson


Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.