Comments on: Create Youtube playlist from list of links

Question: Create Youtube playlist from list of links

dirtdirt — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 06:55:12 -0800

I want to create Youtube playlists based on lists of Youtube URLs. How?

A common use case is: someone asks MetaFilter a question about good music, and a bunch of folks respond with links to Youtube. And I want to listen to it all, but I don't want to sit and click through each one! Or, someone will post a mega-YouTube linkdump, and I want to listen to it all, but I don't want to sit and click through each one!

Extracting the URLs is trivial - how do I queue them up to play? An on-the-fly playlist is good (roll.io looks like it might be able to do this, but I can't actually get it to do anything), but a real saveable playlist that I can then access from my AppleTV is ideal.

By: xingcat

xingcat — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 06:58:10 -0800

There's a feature in YouTube (sign up for a YouTube account, which can be the same as your Google account) called Playlists. You can create playlists right there!

By: dirtdirt

dirtdirt — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 07:00:32 -0800

D'oh! I should have mentioned that in my question! In order to create playlists through the interface you need to open each video, click add to playlist, and so forth. And, yeah, it works, but it involves babysitting it, and manually touching each video. I want something more automatic!

By: Monsieur Caution

Monsieur Caution — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:20:06 -0800

It ought to be possible to write a Python script that consumes a URL and retrieves it via the Requests or urllib2 libraries, scrapes the Youtube links out of the page (a regex should do), and uses the Youtube API to create/update playlists and playlistitems. Here's Google's sample Python code for working with the Youtube API. I'd guess you're looking at an hour of work, if you know Python--maybe 3 hours if you know how to program but haven't used Python before.

By: mermily

mermily — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:08:21 -0800

I post most of my bookmarks to various categories of Pinterest pages out of convenience. I have one for music and I like that I can access it anywhere. Here!

By: litlnemo

litlnemo — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:54:55 -0800

There is an "add to playlist by URL" field on the new playlist screen. So you can just rapidly paste them in without having to open each video at all.

I can't get to the page at the moment, but I will come back and post specifically how to find it when I get back to my computer.

By: litlnemo

litlnemo — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:00:15 -0800

OK, here's how you get there. Go to YouTube while logged in. Make a new playlist by whichever method you prefer. Go to your home page on YouTube, and click "Playlists" in the left column. Find your new playlist in the list, and click on its name. You'll see the page for that playlist. At the upper left, click "Edit Playlist". Then the editing screen will appear, with a button: "Add video by URL." Click that. Paste in each URL, click the "Add" button, and you're set!

Not quite as fast as a solution that would process an entire list of URLs without human intervention, but still pretty darned fast if you have the list ready to go.