If a video is removed from the playlist you still keep it on your computer right? Also, is possible to put comments inside playlist.txt?

#List of music
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1KYlOjI34ob_hicXVBuukA/playlists
#List of movies
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWKjhJtqVAbnqBxcdjVGgT3uVR10bzTEB
#List of shorts
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcetZ6gSk968l1s4WuxwyhiyEUmg5GOZC

The status of a vid on the website doesn’t matter as far as the already downloaded ones are concerned. Otherwise would be absolutely pointless to try to archive something.

Yes, that’s how the comments work.

The date options can be useful too (as only the video title has changed, the upload date should be the same).

Videos can be filtered by their upload date using the options --date, --datebefore or --dateafter. They accept dates in two formats:

Absolute dates: Dates in the format YYYYMMDD.
Relative dates: Dates in the format (now|today)[+-][0-9](day|week|month|year)(s)?

Examples:

Download only the videos uploaded in the last 6 months

$ youtube-dl --dateafter now-6months

Download only the videos uploaded on January 1, 1970

$ youtube-dl --date 19700101

$ # Download only the videos uploaded in the 200x decade $ youtube-dl --dateafter 20000101 --datebefore 20091231

Inside a batch file you can put… a single video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdIskHlqRwc a whole channel (obviously beware, could be thosuands…) https://www.youtube.com/user/bbclearningenglish/videos a single playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcetZ6gSk968eYHxKIIMe0N1yDQUfZx-G all playlists for a channel https://www.youtube.com/user/bbclearningenglish/playlists

Any combination of the above.

For what could be a very large number of videos like, https://www.youtube.com/user/bbclearningenglish/videos , I would always run the --get-title option to a text file first to find out how many videos I might be downloading and see if I do not want any.

Also be aware, as I am sure you are, that one video can be in more than one playlist on the same site and if you use the option --download-archive youtube-dl-history.txt (or whatever you want to call your history file) the video will only be downloaded once and placed from the first playlist it is found in.

I use the following output commands to keep playlists together, either -o “%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s-%(title)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s” or -o “%(playlist)s/%(upload_date)s-%(title)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s”

I hope this helps and is a little clearer. It is past my bedtime! 😃

Apologies for the formatting. I also don’t seem to be able to edit my posts! Grrr.

“how do you get to use ID and check for it with a simple download command, say”

youtube-dl --get-id https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcetZ6gSk968l1s4WuxwyhiyEUmg5GOZC > this-list-id.txt youtube-dl --get-title https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcetZ6gSk968l1s4WuxwyhiyEUmg5GOZC > this-list-title.txt

I do not know how to get one file with a nicely formatted id,title so I do it with two runs and merge the files. The following gives a single line for each id and each title, which doubles file length and isn’t so easy to read; youtube-dl --get-id --get-title https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcetZ6gSk968l1s4WuxwyhiyEUmg5GOZC > this-list.txt

Here is a command I use regularly

youtube-dl -f mp4 --no-check-certificate --ignore-errors --restrict-filenames --download-archive youtube-dl-history.txt --add-metadata --batch-file playlist.txt -o “%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s-%(title)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s”

History is contained in youtube-dl-history.txt List of playlists in playlist.txt

I hope this makes sense.