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
    0·
    6 months 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