I hope this is the proper place to ask, though probably only indirectly on topic for this community.

What I am looking for is a way or tool to extract from a YouTube playlist the information which of my saved videos (usually very niche music from about a decade ago) are no longer available in it (so that I might procure them elsewhere).

With google being google, and the condensed information of “x videos are no longer available” that is displayed, I am fairly sure the information isnt gone gone, just hidden from the user.

Is there a way to get at that info?

Thanks in advance

  • kabi@lemm.eeEnglish
    24·
    20 days ago

    You can get all the IDs using yt-dlp

    yt-dlp --flat-playlist --print id <playlist>

    Assuming you’re on linux, you can add >> ids_all.txt at the end to save the list to a file.

    You can also add

    --compat-options no-youtube-unavailable-videos

    to get only the list of available videos instead and then, again assuming you’re on linux, do

    diff ids_all.txt ids_available.txt

    to get the odd ones out. That’s the simplest I could come up with. You’ll have to hope you can use the wayback machine, or a good old exact search to turn up what video that ID actually referred to

    • TelorandEnglish
      1·
      19 days ago

      >> and diff also work on the latest version of Powershell, so all of your instructions should work on both Linux and Windows.

      • kabi@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        19 days ago

        Ah, nice! I tried to avoid powershell while on windows, so don’t know much about it.

  • Luke@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    20 days ago

    What I’ve done in the past is to copy the URL of the unavailable video (if it’s still accessible via the playlist entry, sometimes it isn’t which is annoying) and feed it into the Wayback Machine in the hopes that it got archived at some point. The video stream isn’t usually available that way, but at least the page title sometimes is, and then I can search for other versions of it.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    20 days ago

    Run yt-dlp against the playlist and look for errors? You can probably filter or script it too, or extract the list items, iterate over them individually, and look for a nonzero exit code.