urllib2 - Timeout a file download with Python urllib?

Question

Python beginner here. I want to be able to timeout my download of a video file if the process takes longer than 500 seconds.

import urllib
try:
   urllib.urlretrieve ("http://www.videoURL.mp4", "filename.mp4")
except Exception as e:
   print("error")

How do I amend my code to make that happen?

Answer 1

Better way is to use requests so you can stream the results and easily check for timeouts:

import requests

# Make the actual request, set the timeout for no data to 10 seconds and enable streaming responses so we don't have to keep the large files in memory
request = requests.get('http://www.videoURL.mp4', timeout=10, stream=True)

# Open the output file and make sure we write in binary mode
with open('filename.mp4', 'wb') as fh:
    # Walk through the request response in chunks of 1024 * 1024 bytes, so 1MiB
    for chunk in request.iter_content(1024 * 1024):
        # Write the chunk to the file
        fh.write(chunk)
        # Optionally we can check here if the download is taking too long