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diff --git a/source/_posts/2014-11-05-list-youtube-playlist-with-youtube-dl.md b/source/_posts/2014-11-05-list-youtube-playlist-with-youtube-dl.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bb269946 --- /dev/null +++ b/source/_posts/2014-11-05-list-youtube-playlist-with-youtube-dl.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "List YouTube playlist with youtube-dl" +date: 2014-11-05 10:37:58 -0800 +comments: true +categories: [youtube, video, 'web scraping'] +--- +Of course you are always welcome to use the [Google APIs Client Library for Python](https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/python/) to wrestle with YouTube, which is usually pretty simple. (As an added bonus, YouTube has some [nice runnable sample scripts](https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/code_samples/) to get you started.) With the client library, listing videos in a YouTube playlist is a breeze. + +However, if you don't feel like writing code yourself (I usually don't feel like writing code myself until I use something often enough and existing solutions are suboptimal), `youtube-dl` recently added the functionality to list videos in a playlist with the `--flat-playlist` option. + +[According to one of the project collaborators](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/4003#issuecomment-60322630), currently `--flat-playlist` is only helpful with the `-j` option for dumping JSON (so I suppose this feature is subject to change). For instance, `--flat-playlist` alone would emit something like this: + +```bash +> youtube-dl --flat-playlist 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdOwwI0ngqQ&list=PLPpZI8R1zUfrkDbmJMOBhEbJ9Td9vbV-F' +[youtube:playlist] Downloading playlist PLPpZI8R1zUfrkDbmJMOBhEbJ9Td9vbV-F - add --no-playlist to just download video gdOwwI0ngqQ +[youtube:playlist] PLPpZI8R1zUfrkDbmJMOBhEbJ9Td9vbV-F: Downloading webpage +[youtube:playlist] PLPpZI8R1zUfrkDbmJMOBhEbJ9Td9vbV-F: Downloading page #1 +[download] Downloading playlist: Cam By apinknomfan +[youtube:playlist] playlist Cam By apinknomfan: Collected 119 video ids (downloading 119 of them) +[download] Downloading video #1 of 119 +[download] Downloading video #2 of 119 +[download] Downloading video #3 of 119 +[download] Downloading video #4 of 119 +... +``` + +which doesn't really make sense — it tells you that it collected 119 video ids, and no more. Once you have `-j` on, you get JSON data that you can parse with anything: + +```bash +> youtube-dl -j --flat-playlist 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdOwwI0ngqQ&list=PLPpZI8R1zUfrkDbmJMOBhEbJ9Td9vbV-F' +{"url": "gdOwwI0ngqQ", "_type": "url", "ie_key": "Youtube", "id": "gdOwwI0ngqQ"} +{"url": "j9l5nchv1Z8", "_type": "url", "ie_key": "Youtube", "id": "j9l5nchv1Z8"} +{"url": "znW5ALwWNQw", "_type": "url", "ie_key": "Youtube", "id": "znW5ALwWNQw"} +{"url": "qyE7-auTIcc", "_type": "url", "ie_key": "Youtube", "id": "qyE7-auTIcc"} +... +``` + +The most straightforward way to parse this is to use a command line JSON parser, the best one being [jq](https://github.com/stedolan/jq): + +```bash +> youtube-dl -j --flat-playlist 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdOwwI0ngqQ&list=PLPpZI8R1zUfrkDbmJMOBhEbJ9Td9vbV-F' | jq -r '.id' | sed 's_^_https://youtube.com/v/_' +https://youtube.com/v/gdOwwI0ngqQ +https://youtube.com/v/j9l5nchv1Z8 +https://youtube.com/v/znW5ALwWNQw +https://youtube.com/v/qyE7-auTIcc +... +``` + +There you go, a list of URIs you can use. Of course you can put this in a script to save some typing: + +{% gist 0245788475f963210ed9 %} + +By the way, `youtube-dl` supports playlist bulk download natively. The reason I need a list of video ids or URIs, however, is that among other things, `youtube-dl` doesn't download highest resolution DASH video by default, so I have to rely on something like `youtube-dl-dash` ([link](https://github.com/zmwangx/sh/blob/master/youtube-dl-dash)) to download the best version. |