youtube-dl: Can't download youtube playlists or channels

This should have a new update to fix this ; youtu.be download is the main feature for this script. Hope this happens soon

The YouTube revised today, you can modify this files: youtube_dl\extractor\youtube.py

    def _entries(self, page, playlist_id):
        more_widget_html = content_html = page
        for page_num in itertools.count(1):
            for entry in self._process_page(content_html):
                yield entry
                
            pattern = r'"nextContinuationData":{"continuation":"(?P<ctoken>[^\"]+)(?:[\s|\S]+?)"clickTrackingParams":"(?P<itct>[^\"]+)'
            mobj = re.search(pattern, more_widget_html)
            if mobj:
                more_url = 'https://www.youtube.com/browse_ajax?ctoken=%s&itct=%s' % (mobj.group('ctoken'), mobj.group('itct'))
            else:
                mobj = re.search(r'data-uix-load-more-href="/?(?P<more>[^"]+)"', more_widget_html)
                if not mobj:
                    break

                more_url = 'https://www.youtube.com/' + mobj.group('more')

            headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Maxthon/4.9.5.1000 Chrome/39.0.2146.0 Safari/537.36'}
            more = self._download_json(
                more_url,
                'Downloading page #%s' % page_num,
                headers=headers,
                transform_source=uppercase_escape)
            content_html = more['content_html']
            if not content_html.strip():
                # Some webpages show a "Load more" button but they don't
                # have more videos
                break
            more_widget_html = more['load_more_widget_html']

   def extract_videos_from_page(self, page):
        ids_in_page = []
        titles_in_page = []
        druation_in_page = []

        pattern = self._VIDEO_RE if 'playlistVideoRenderer' in page else self._VIDEO_RE_OLD
        for mobj in re.finditer(pattern, page):
            ...

_VIDEO_RE_OLD = r'href="\s*/watch\?v=(?P<id>[0-9A-Za-z_-]{11})&amp;[^"]*?index=(?P<index>\d+)(?:[^>]+>(?P<title>[^<]+))?'
_VIDEO_RE = r'"playlistVideoRenderer":{"videoId":"(?P<id>[^\"]+)(?:[\s|\S]+?)"title":(?:[\s|\S]+?)"simpleText":"(?P<title>[^\"]+)(?:[\s|\S]+?)"lengthText":(?:[\s|\S]+?)"simpleText":"(?P<duration>[^\"]+)'

       playlist_title = self._html_search_regex(
            r'(?s)<h1 class="pl-header-title[^"]*"[^>]*>\s*(.*?)\s*</h1>',
            page, 'title', fatal=False, default=None)
        if not playlist_title:
            playlist_title = playlist_title = self._og_search_title(page)

OK

Patch tested on a user and a channel, don’t blame if it breaks something else…

From 953ca568dcde08fc55a0c245036e390c2e8061bc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Ivan Kozik <ivan@ludios.org>
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2017 02:26:41 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] Get non-Polymer YouTube pages because channel/playlist
 download is broken for Polymer pages

---
 youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py | 10 +++++-----
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py b/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py
index ea6f12f8e..d892db943 100644
--- a/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py
+++ b/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py
@@ -267,7 +267,7 @@ class YoutubeEntryListBaseInfoExtractor(YoutubeBaseInfoExtractor):
                 break
 
             more = self._download_json(
-                'https://youtube.com/%s' % mobj.group('more'), playlist_id,
+                'https://www.youtube.com/%s&disable_polymer=true' % mobj.group('more'), playlist_id,
                 'Downloading page #%s' % page_num,
                 transform_source=uppercase_escape)
             content_html = more['content_html']
@@ -310,7 +310,7 @@ class YoutubePlaylistsBaseInfoExtractor(YoutubeEntryListBaseInfoExtractor):
                 r'<h3[^>]+class="[^"]*yt-lockup-title[^"]*"[^>]*><a[^>]+href="/?playlist\?list=([0-9A-Za-z-_]{10,})"',
                 content)):
             yield self.url_result(
-                'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=%s' % playlist_id, 'YoutubePlaylist')
+                'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=%s&disable_polymer=true' % playlist_id, 'YoutubePlaylist')
 
     def _real_extract(self, url):
         playlist_id = self._match_id(url)
@@ -2325,7 +2325,7 @@ class YoutubePlaylistIE(YoutubePlaylistBaseInfoExtractor):
 class YoutubeChannelIE(YoutubePlaylistBaseInfoExtractor):
     IE_DESC = 'YouTube.com channels'
     _VALID_URL = r'https?://(?:youtu\.be|(?:\w+\.)?youtube(?:-nocookie)?\.com)/channel/(?P<id>[0-9A-Za-z_-]+)'
-    _TEMPLATE_URL = 'https://www.youtube.com/channel/%s/videos'
+    _TEMPLATE_URL = 'https://www.youtube.com/channel/%s/videos?disable_polymer=true'
     _VIDEO_RE = r'(?:title="(?P<title>[^"]+)"[^>]+)?href="/watch\?v=(?P<id>[0-9A-Za-z_-]+)&?'
     IE_NAME = 'youtube:channel'
     _TESTS = [{
@@ -2382,7 +2382,7 @@ class YoutubeChannelIE(YoutubePlaylistBaseInfoExtractor):
         if channel_playlist_id and channel_playlist_id.startswith('UC'):
             playlist_id = 'UU' + channel_playlist_id[2:]
             return self.url_result(
-                compat_urlparse.urljoin(url, '/playlist?list=%s' % playlist_id), 'YoutubePlaylist')
+                compat_urlparse.urljoin(url, '/playlist?list=%s&disable_polymer=true' % playlist_id), 'YoutubePlaylist')
 
         channel_page = self._download_webpage(url, channel_id, 'Downloading page #1')
         autogenerated = re.search(r'''(?x)
@@ -2416,7 +2416,7 @@ class YoutubeChannelIE(YoutubePlaylistBaseInfoExtractor):
 class YoutubeUserIE(YoutubeChannelIE):
     IE_DESC = 'YouTube.com user videos (URL or "ytuser" keyword)'
     _VALID_URL = r'(?:(?:https?://(?:\w+\.)?youtube\.com/(?:(?P<user>user|c)/)?(?!(?:attribution_link|watch|results)(?:$|[^a-z_A-Z0-9-])))|ytuser:)(?!feed/)(?P<id>[A-Za-z0-9_-]+)'
-    _TEMPLATE_URL = 'https://www.youtube.com/%s/%s/videos'
+    _TEMPLATE_URL = 'https://www.youtube.com/%s/%s/videos?disable_polymer=true'
     IE_NAME = 'youtube:user'
 
     _TESTS = [{
-- 
2.14.1

I would consider @ivan patch a temporary backward compatibility from YouTube & they may disable this option at any time.

@awei78 Why don’t you create a pr for your patch?

if i try download some channels - i see this [youtube:channel] playlist UC_some_channekl_ID: Downloading 0 videos

Here is a patch using @awei78 's fix until official fix:

https://github.com/GTechAlpha/youtube-dl/commit/0ae0db13d1cecefde301bf5ba6770f409b3bb6bf.patch

Full credit and thanks to @awei78 .

I experienced this issue as well, awei78 's suggested changes to extractor/youtube.py fixed the error for me; thanks!