How to identify “unavailable" videos on yt? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 2 months ago by GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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

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[-] kabi@lemm.ee 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 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