Episode: 2675
Title: HPR2675: YouTube Playlists
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2675/hpr2675.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 07:20:49

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This is HPR Episode 2675 entitled YouTube Playlist.
It is hosted by a hukka and in about 13 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is how to solve a problem with following YouTube channels.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is a hukka welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
And what I'm going to do in this one is describe the solution to a problem involving YouTube,
channels, playlists, and you know, some people are going to find this useful.
I watch a lot of YouTube videos.
In fact, I'll record a program about that as well.
But in fact, I watch videos there every day and I have been known to go weeks without
even turning on my television.
We have cable TV mostly because my wife likes it and I like her, so we have cable.
Now, most of the videos I watch are part of ongoing series that are packaged as channels in YouTube.
Now, if you subscribe to a channel and then click on the bell icon,
you will get an email every time a new video is released by that channel.
In many cases, that's all I want.
That example, one of the channels I subscribe to is called computer file.
And what they do on this channel is they interview professors of computer science,
many of them at the University of Nottingham,
on a variety of topics, and I will generally watch whenever a new one comes out.
But, you know, they're just, you know, each video is just a separate topic.
There's no particular order that matters.
Lately, however, I subscribe to a number of channels by people who travel in recreational
vehicles or RVs, as we call them here in the United States.
In England, I believe they are generally referred to as caravans.
I don't know about other places.
My wife and I are planning to get an RV to do some traveling when we retire,
which right now is scheduled for 2021.
And so, watching videos on YouTube is a way to learn more about it.
When I find a channel I really like with people I consider engaging,
I often will want to go back to the beginning and watch their series in order.
You know, often these are, it's almost like a travel diary and you want to see what's
happening to people day by day as they go through their journey.
And YouTube does not make it easy to do this.
It is, however, possible.
And I want to explain how I have done this.
Well, I'm not the only one, but I'm going to pass this along for anyone who wants to know.
Now, I've done this for a particular reason.
As I've just explained, I want to be able to watch these RV channels in order.
Now, since so much music is now available on YouTube, I could see another use case where someone
might want to play list of all the videos uploaded by an artist they like.
And there are probably other use cases I have not considered,
but I'll wager Ken would love to have a show about them if you have your own use for this technique.
So, please do a show.
Now, step one, get all the videos.
Which is harder than you might think or say more obscure.
YouTube does not make this easy.
You would think you could just go to the homepage of the channel and there be something that says,
show me all the videos and then they don't quite do that.
But YouTube in their database knows.
So, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get that data out of there.
Now, you may find a channel that has a comprehensive playlist ready for you.
It might be labeled as uploads, but generally uploads button doesn't do what you think it would do.
But I've only seen this a few times.
I'm guessing it's probably something added by the channel owner since these are not common.
The technique I'm going to give you works for any channel.
So, step one, you have to get a code.
And to do that, you first click on a video from that channel.
You don't start with the channel homepage.
Because if you do that, you won't get where you want to get.
But you start with one of the videos and then click on the name of the channel.
And you will get something that says HTTPS colon slash slash www.youtube.com slash channel slash.
And then something that looks like base 64 code or something.
So, I see something.
You see lowercase w, number five, uppercase w, y, lowercase t, uppercase mxq, seven, and so on and so on.
I have an example in the show.
If you go to the show notes, you can get to the page where I've written all of this down.
So, that long code starts with capital U, capital C. That's the code you want.
And no matter what the channel, it will always start with UC.
Copy that code to your clipboard.
Now, if you go to any of the other videos, just pick one, a video from this channel.
And it will have a URL that looks like HTTPS colon slash slash www.youtube.com slash
watch, w, a, t, c, h, question mark, v equals capital P, lowercase, oh, capital T, lowercase a,
you've got that URL for that particular video. Take that URL and then add to the end,
ampersand, LIST equals. And then paste in the code that you copied to the clipboard.
So, you know, w, a, t, c, h, question mark, v equals capital P, lowercase, oh, blah blah blah blah,
and LIST equals U, capital U, capital C, w, five, you know.
Again, I've written this all out on a page on my website.
And the link is in the show notes. So, if you want to see the full example, you can do that.
Now, here's the key. The code that you paste in, that capital U, capital C at the beginning,
replace the C with a capital U. So, it now reads capital U, capital U, lowercase w, five,
uppercase w, y, lowercase t, uppercase m, x, q, and so on. And then hit enter. Now,
that will start the particular video that you had selected.
But if you look over to the right, you'll see now there's a block on the page that says uploads from,
and we'll put in the name of the channel.
Under that, it will say one of some number, which is the number of videos that that channel has
uploaded. So, you now have a playlist of all the videos in this channel.
Under the numbers, there are two buttons, one for loop and the other for shuffle.
Now, if you're making a playlist of music videos, you're probably done at this point.
But the playlist starts with the most recent video and works backwards from there.
For what I want to do, something more is required. I want to start at the oldest video and work my way
forward. So, I got to get the order right. Now, YouTube does not give you a button to reverse the
order. Seems simple enough, but they don't do it. For this, I use a Google Chrome plugin called
Eritium, link in the show notes, which is available in the Google Chrome Web Store.
This is a useful plugin for a number of things, and is really a way to add features to YouTube
that Google didn't think of. So, you just go to the Chrome Web Store, install it, click the icon.
Now, this is for Chrome. I do my YouTube watching on Chrome. So, if you want to use another browser,
you can see if there's anything like Eritium on other browsers, I'm just saying. I use Chrome.
So, I install it. Once it's installed, I click on its icon, and the icon is a triangle. It's
almost like an arrow pointing to the right with kind of blue on the bottom and purple on the top.
So, I click the icon, and then that opens up the settings, and I go to the section video,
and in the section playlist, make sure it has turned on Enable Reverse Playlist Control.
Which, you know, probably is already on, but you just want to verify that. With that done,
go back to the page that had the playlist you created. You may need to reload the page,
but you will see a third control added, which lets you reverse the order of the playlist.
So, in addition to loop and shuffle, there'll now be in arrows pointing in opposite directions.
This is the one for reversing the order. Now, what I found,
okay, is that, you know, I'm still on whatever video I used to set up this list,
which may be in the middle, it may be at the end, it may be very recent.
I need to get back to the beginning. Well, so I'll scroll up as far as I can.
For some reason, this playlist on the side only shows a certain number of videos.
You know, it's a large number, you know, 40 or 50 or something. I haven't actually counted.
But if it's a channel that has several hundred of these things uploaded,
it's going to take me a few shots to get up there. So, I'll scroll up as far as I can,
click on the top video. A moment later, I can now scroll up some more, click the top video,
and so on. Now, the very first video will have an index number that is equal to the total
number of videos in the channel. So, you know, I've seen playlists where
the oldest video has an index number of, you know, 518 and followed by index number of 517,
which is followed by index number of 516 and so on. So, that's fine. But, you know, if you want
to watch them in order, one of the nice things is you can just start with the first one,
the play, and because it's a playlist, when that video is done, it'll automatically go to the very
next one. So, there's something that I found very handy. Now, because the Eritium plugin is a
Chrome plugin, once you have it installed, you can create additional playlists for other channels.
You don't need to repeat the Eritium install. You just need to create the playlist using
what we described above, then just click the reverse button and you're good to go. So, this is
Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and reminding everyone to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye!
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