Search all playlists of a channel instead of only Uploads - to support playlists created from videos of other channels

[03stevensmi]

@h0lg Hey man, I got a question or request if its not doable yet...
Is there a way to search for video captions through a channels full playlists
instead of the channels individual playlists?

So like if a yt channel has 1000 playlists... I can use subtubular to caption search through them all
instead of copy and pasting 1000 playlist urls.

Does SubTubular currently have a way or option to do a full channel playlist search?
If not, could there be somthing like "SubTubular s channel --channel-playlists -f [search]" be possible?

This would make finding certain videos in ether
specific channels, or our own channels with a large collection of playlists a lot easier!
Especially if we don't know, or remember the name of the video with the certain phrase your looking for,
and/or which playlist that video was listed in.

That would be a big help for us if this could be achieved man.

But... if there is an alternative way or method i could do to quickly get
A channels full playlist url's and combine the playlists links in a single search with
the current version of SubTubular, that will also be good enough as long as it gets the job done.

Once again, thank you so much for all your amazing hard work
and contributions you made to helping us find what we are trying to find on a VERY restricted internet!
Thank You!
:)

[h0lg]

Hey @03stevensmi - glad you still find it helpful!

The channels scope is probably what you're looking for. It searches the special Uploads playlist that's generated by YouTube for every channel and contains all uploaded videos in all playlists. The only caveat is that the playlist/videos must be public, i.e. private videos aren't included.

I didn't find that Uploads playlist linked in the current YouTube UI.
I looked into how YoutubeExplode does it and found that it uses the algo described in this stackexchage post to access it.

Here's a script you can use to open the Uploads playlist in your browser to check the videos it contains:

1. Open a YouTube channel page
2. On that, open the developer console (via Ctrl + Shift + J)
3. Into that, paste the following script:

(() => {
  // Look for the canonical link to get the channel ID
  const canonical = document.querySelector('link[rel=canonical]');

  if (!canonical) {
    alert("No canonical link found on this page.");
    return;
  }

  const url = new URL(canonical.href);

  if (!url.pathname.startsWith("/channel/UC")) {
    alert("Canonical URL is not a /channel/UC… link.");
    return;
  }

  // Replace channel/UC… with playlist?list=UU…
  const playlistUrl = url.href.replace(/\/channel\/UC/, "/playlist?list=UU");

  // Open in a new tab
  window.open(playlistUrl, '_blank');
})();

[03stevensmi]

@h0lg sorry for the late reply, I've been very busy.
I've done what you said and it gave me (like you said) the channel uploads playlist...
but i wanted the channels "Playlists" rather than the a playlist of a channel.

This is the channel i'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/@OggOne/playlists

He has an extremely large archive of cartoon episodes and series
collected and categorised into separate playlists from
hundreds and hundreds of yt channels all over the net!

I wanted to search through the videos inside all those playlists,
rather than copy and paste ever single playlist url individually.

BTW, Thanks for getting back to me quickly, and once again...
i'm sorry its taken me 2 weeks to reply.
Thank You!

03stevensmi

[h0lg]

@03stevensmi No worries and thanks for the example - it helped me understand what you are trying to achieve.

Most of the playlists in https://www.youtube.com/@OggOne/playlists seem - as you pointed out - to contain videos from other YouTube channels, so the Uploads playlist doesn't contain and searching the channel with SubTubular misses them.

I wasn't aware of that YouTube feature - and no, searching all playlists of a channel is currently not supported.
But it can surely be done and sounds like a sensible feature.

It may require "exploding" a channel into its playlists in a separate prep step, then searching those playlists. The current architecture for searching playlists doesn't have the concept of nested playlists.
Either way, searching hundreds of playlists in the same operation will be challenging with the current model, even when cached.
I may have to combine them into the same cache to make that efficient.

Let me think about this for a bit.

[h0lg]

@03stevensmi I did a bit of research on listing the playlists of a channel and according to this discussion it's not supported by YoutubeExplode - nor will it be.
Looking at the behavior of the playlists page of a channel I can understand why. I wouldn't want to implement the paged loading of playlists while scrolling down and parsing the results either - without an automated browser.

That means we may have to bite the bullet and use the official YouTube Data API to explode a channel into playlists, as suggested in the linked discussion.

For the user, that means that to use this feature, you have to

• get a Google Cloud account
• create a project for your SubTubular instances
• Enable the YouTube Data API v3 for that project (APIs & Services → Library → “YouTube Data API v3” → Enable).
• Create an API key (APIs & Services → Credentials → Create credentials → API key)
• Paste the API key into a new SubTubular Setting so that it can be used for API calls.

That account starts as a free trial, which you have to convert into a billable one after three months - or your API keys stop working.

AFAIK It's unlikely you'd ever incur costs for using this rather cheap (1 token) method of the YouTube Data API, which you get 10k free tokens for every month. And you'd be able to set up spending alerts to your email if ever you incur any cost at all. But you'll have to register with a credit card for potential costs you incur.

Now that's a bit of hassle and a hard sale for the average user.
I realized that when I first looked into the YouTube Data API and decided against it for that reason. For this feature, it may be required though.

I'll let it simmer for a while to see if I can come up with a stable solution that doesn't require a Google Cloud account.

[h0lg]

@03stevensmi As a work-around, you can paste the following script into the console (open via Ctrl + Shift + J) on a channel's playlists page, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@OggOne/playlists .

It will keep scrolling down the page until all playlists are loaded and - when done, output their IDs into the console in the space-separated format the SubTubular.Shell.exe understands.

(() => {
    let lastCount = 0;
    let triesWithoutGrowth = 0;

    // helper to grab current playlist links
    function getLinks() {
        return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(
            'yt-lockup-view-model a.yt-core-attributed-string__link[href*="list="]'));
    }

    // called periodically to check for more loaded playlists
    const interval = setInterval(() => {
        const links = getLinks();

        if (links.length > lastCount) {
            // new playlists loaded, scroll last one into view to load more
            lastCount = links.length;
            triesWithoutGrowth = 0;
            links.at(-1).scrollIntoView();
        } else {
            // no new ones since last tick
            triesWithoutGrowth++;

            if (triesWithoutGrowth > 5) { // after 5 intervals without growth, we're considered done
                clearInterval(interval); // stop checking for more

                // collect unique playlist IDs
                const ids = [...new Set(
                    links.map(a => {
                        const url = new URL(a.href, location.origin);
                        return url.searchParams.get("list"); // may return null
                    }).filter(Boolean) // remove null (falsy) values
                )];

                // output playlist IDs in the format SubTubular expects
                console.info(`Found ${ids.length} playlist IDs:`, ids.join(" "));
            }
        }
    }, 1000); // repeat every second
})();

[03stevensmi]

@03stevensmi As a work-around, you can paste the following script into the console (open via Ctrl + Shift + J) on a channel's playlists page, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@OggOne/playlists .

It will keep scrolling down the page until all playlists are loaded and - when done, output their IDs into the console in the space-separated format the SubTubular.Shell.exe understands.

(() => {
let lastCount = 0;
let triesWithoutGrowth = 0;

// helper to grab current playlist links
function getLinks() {
    return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(
        'yt-lockup-view-model a.yt-core-attributed-string__link[href*="list="]'));
}

// called periodically to check for more loaded playlists
const interval = setInterval(() => {
    const links = getLinks();

    if (links.length > lastCount) {
        // new playlists loaded, scroll last one into view to load more
        lastCount = links.length;
        triesWithoutGrowth = 0;
        links.at(-1).scrollIntoView();
    } else {
        // no new ones since last tick
        triesWithoutGrowth++;

        if (triesWithoutGrowth > 5) { // after 5 intervals without growth, we're considered done
            clearInterval(interval); // stop checking for more

            // collect unique playlist IDs
            const ids = [...new Set(
                links.map(a => {
                    const url = new URL(a.href, location.origin);
                    return url.searchParams.get("list"); // may return null
                }).filter(Boolean) // remove null (falsy) values
            )];

            // output playlist IDs in the format SubTubular expects
            console.info(`Found ${ids.length} playlist IDs:`, ids.join(" "));
        }
    }
}, 1000); // repeat every second

})();

Thanks man, I will try it out tomorrow. Hope you find a suitable work around. Good Luck!