Youtube video statistics

Is there a way to programmatical开发者_开发技巧ly get to the details statistics of a youtube video?

For example, using this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT7_CtjEVFU

If I click on the "show video statistics" (next to the view counter), I get nice information like this (stats button underlined in red):

At first I thought I could get to this through the Youtube API, but it doesn't seem to be possible.

Next, I thought about parsing the data manually. However, on page load, the data isn't there as part of the page source. It appears only after I click the stats button.

Is there a way I can simulate clicking the button when using some fetching tool (like wget)? My hope is to be able to wget the statistics data and then parse it offline.

Using the Chrome inspectors network tab, I was able to see that when you click the stats button, there is an ajax call to the following page:

http://www.youtube.com/insight_ajax?action_get_statistics_and_data=1&v=######

(Where ###### is the video id) That seems to return some kind of XML document which must be parsed by the page and turned into the stats readout. I think that would be a good starting point for your investigation.

Edit: I just looked slightly deeper beyond the first line of the response, and it's not even really XML, it's pretty much just the HTML of the stats panel.