YouTube likes to periodically delete videos that are on my favorites list:
But they refuse to tell me what they were so I can go find another copy.
I would like a way to export my YouTube playlists, so that I can periodically diff them, and manually find other copies of the deleted songs.
How can I export my playlists (or a playlist) from YouTube?
As far as I am aware, there's no built in way to do this on Youtube.
You could of course use the Youtube API to easily get all of your playlists in xml using the following:
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/[YOUR_USER_NAME]/playlists?v=2
Example: https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/oisinorion/playlists?v=2
That xml file will have the unique IDs for each of your playlists, which you can then use to get the details for each playlist, including Video URLs and titles. The following API call will again give you an xml file:
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/[UNIQUE_ID]?v=2
Example: https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/D5F03C2BE1AA3E7E?v=2
Working with those XML files manually would be a nightmare however. It would be best to create a small web app (if you know a bit of web programming) to pull out and present the relevant info from those XML files.
You can read more about the API here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_playlists
max-results=x to the URL, but x > 50 is rejected. Add start-index=... for paging the results.
How about we make this more easy..
Go to: http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/FavBackUp.aspx
Put in the playlist-url you want to create in excel-format, that's all :)
Here's a preview how it looks like. Have exported my short-film playlist which is located sorry not enough credits to post 2 links
The creator: 'All my web application does is use the YouTube developer’s API to get the feed data. You could do the same yourself but it would be in a complicated XML format and not very readable. I think most people would rather have it in an Excel spreadsheet. If you do not have Microsoft Office then you can download Open Office for free.'
Liked was the only list I was interested in and it worked perfectly.
Commented
Jun 7, 2018 at 7:38
This is not the most elegant way to accomplish what you ask, but here's a manual method that I just used to do it. Because I'm using Powershell for part of this, I'm assuming you're on a Windows machine.
Steps:
Assuming your playlist is Favorites, you'll get a Favorites.json. Let's say I want just the title of each video in the playlist and a link to it, in a text file called YoutubeFavorites.txt:
$json = ConvertFrom-Json (Get-Content .\Favorites.json -Raw)
foreach ($vid in $json) { "$($vid.snippet.Title) - Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$($vid.contentDetails.videoId)" | Out-File -FilePath .\YoutubeFavorites.txt -Append }
Voila, enjoy.
In light of deprecation of v2, the current answer is no longer works. v3 is the new version.
The documentation link - https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/playlistItems/list
This limits to only 50 results. Fill in the following
Example link - https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/playlistItems?part=contentDetails&maxResults=50&pageToken=NNNNN&playlistId=PLXxxx=key=yyyy
Nowadays there are many solutions that do even more than what you requested:
http://www.playlist-converter.net/ - Convert your playlist from multiple music services and file formats
https://sourceforge.net/projects/youtubeexport/ - This program is used to export youtube playlists to text or .html files
https://soundiiz.com/ - Upload playlists from files, web URLs or plain text, transfer your favorites between all streaming platforms, download to all popular files formats
But the most efficient & elegant solution would be in my opinion to just use youtube-dl because with one single command like (which you can easily build yourself by looking at the docs) you can download ALL your playlists items titles (well not only the titles, if you cared...), by entering as a parameter the YouTube URL to the page showing all your playlists (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/your_user_name/playlists). On top of that it also has an option to make authenticated requests to YouTube (with your credentials) so it can also download your private playlists.
I've created a service called www.recovermy.video to fix this problem. See my answer on another question.
You can do it with a new site we Developed https://www.tunemymusic.com/
You can choose export from Youtube a specific playlist, all your playlists and also all your liked videos. Then you can export it for free text file.
In addition to text file, we are now working on adding options to export to csv and m3u files
Use Google Takeout.
Sorry, screenshot doesn't include OK. It's at the bottom of the modal where you select playlists.
You can make a Bookmarklet in your browser in order to catch the description of each video in the list and then print them all in a textarea.
For example this script will create a list with the url's and the names of the videos. Simply create a bookmark and add the following script in the address (URL) of the bookmark:
javascript:var Description = "Export YouTube playlists. This script is in the Public Domain - created at: 2016-11-21";
function printline(myLine) {
document.write(myLine+"\n");
};
function showlinks() {
var today = new Date();
var day = today.getDate();
var month = today.getMonth()+1;
var year = today.getFullYear();
document.write("<html><head><title>YouTube list: " + Title + "</title></head><body>");
printline("<textarea name='Links' rows='55' cols='200'>");
printline(year + "-" + month + "-" + day);
printline(Title +"\n"+url);
printline("");
for (i=0; i<lines.length; i++) printline(lines[i]);
printline("</textarea>");
document.write("</body></html>");
};
var url = document.URL;
var body = document.body.innerHTML;
var lines = [];
if (url.match(/youtube.com/)) {
var x = body.match(/data-list-title=.*/)[0];
var x = x.replace(/.*data-list-title="/, '');
var Title = x.replace(/".*/, '');
var body = body.replace(/data-video-id="/g, 'data-video-id="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=');
if (body.match(/li class=.yt-uix-scroller-scroll-unit/)) {
var matches = body.match(/li class=.yt-uix-scroller-scroll-unit.*/g);
for(i=0; i<matches.length; i++) {
var x = matches[i];
var ID = x.replace(/.*data-video-id=./, "");
var ID = ID.replace(/".*/, "");
var VName = x.replace(/.*data-video-title=./, "");
var VName = VName.replace(/".*/, "");
var x = VName;
var x = ID + "\t" + VName;
lines.push(x);
};
};
};
showlinks();
In case you don't want the url's of the videos, then simply delete the line "var x = ID + "\t" + VName;" (line 36)
This script should work for a while, until YouTube will change the formatting of their HTML pages. When they will do that, you will have to adjust the script accordingly - most likely, you will have to search for something else instead of "data-video-title="
What I did was go to my playlist and right clicked on the name of my playlist then selected "email with Windows Live". It sends a link to your email and when you click the link you have your entire playlist.
Why don't you just open the playlist and copy/paste it to Excel, Word, or whatever? It's not exactly elegant, but the information is there as a backup.
