YouTube Playlist Scraper

YouTube Playlist Scraper: every video in a playlist, as rows

Paste playlist links or bare PL and UU ids and you get one row per video: id, title, watch link, uploader, view count, age, runtime and the largest thumbnail YouTube offers. It keeps paging, so a long playlist comes back in one run rather than stopping at the first twenty.

The thing that catches people out: channelName is read off each video's own byline, not off the playlist. A playlist collecting clips from nineteen creators gives you nineteen different channels, which is usually what you want and occasionally not.

🗂️ What YouTube Playlist Scraper does

Anything with ?list= in it works, including a plain watch link that happens to carry a playlist parameter. Bare ids work too, and so does a Mix. No Google API key, no OAuth screen, no daily quota.

It follows the playlist's own continuations, up to 80 pages per playlist, which is a very long list before it matters. maxItems is the budget for the whole run, not per playlist, so it is also your spend cap.

Videos are deduplicated by videoId across every playlist in the run. A video sitting in two of your playlists is returned once and billed once.

📥 What you give it

{
  "playlistUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeiKm4sgNOknGvNjby9efdf"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Send at least one of playlistUrls or playlistIds. With neither, the run fails rather than returning a polite row.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run, with the thumbnail link cut short:

{
  "ok": true,
  "videoId": "0VH1Lim8gL8",
  "title": "Deep Learning State of the Art (2020)",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VH1Lim8gL8",
  "channelName": "Lex Fridman",
  "channelId": "UCSHZKyawb77ixDdsGog4iWA",
  "viewCountText": "1.3M views",
  "publishedTimeText": "6 years ago",
  "lengthText": "1:27:41",
  "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0VH1Lim8gL8/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=...",
  "mode": "playlist"
}

The counts and dates are strings, not numbers. "1.3M views" is what the page prints, and the exact figure is not in it. If you need integers and real dates, parse what you can and accept the rounding.

🧾 Reading the output

Two kinds of row land in your dataset.

Filter on ok == true and you have your data. A playlist that fails gets its own uncharged diagnostic row naming the playlistId and the reason, and the run carries on to the next one. NO_RESULTS means the run finished with nothing to show, BLOCKED and RATE_LIMITED mean YouTube pushed back on the request, SERVER_ERROR is a 5xx and NETWORK means it could not be reached.

One quirk of the Overview table: it shows the video columns only, so a diagnostic row reads as a blank line there. Open the row or download the JSON to see the errorCode.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open YouTube Playlist Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Paste links into Playlist URLs, or ids into Playlist IDs. 3. Set Max videos. Start at 100 while you look at the shape. 4. Click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it over the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.40 per 1,000 videos. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per video row delivered. Diagnostic rows and duplicates inside a run are never billed, so a playlist that returns nothing delivers no charged rows. maxItems is the ceiling on both the rows and the spend.

💡 What people use it for

• Turning a course or conference playlist into a spreadsheet, then working down it.
• Pulling a channel's uploads playlist as a single ordered list.
• Collecting video ids from a curated playlist to feed the transcript or comments actors.
• Auditing a playlist you inherited, to see which creators are actually in it.

🚧 What it does not do

• Public and unlisted playlists only. A private playlist needs a signed-in account and will not

work here.

• No exact view counts and no real dates. The strings are what the page carries.
• No descriptions, likes, comments or transcripts. Those are separate actors, two linked below.
• Paging stops at 80 pages per playlist. That is a very long list, but it is the ceiling.
• The playlist's own title and owner are not returned. Rows describe videos, not the playlist.
• Order is the playlist's order, and there is no sort option.
• Nothing valid in the input fails the run rather than returning an explanatory row.

🧭 Which YouTube scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a YouTube or Google account? No. Nothing here is signed in, and there is no quota.

Is maxItems per playlist? No, it is the total for the run. Five playlists at 100 gives you 100 rows altogether, not 500.

Why does channelName differ row to row? Because it is the video's uploader, not the playlist's owner. On a channel's own uploads playlist they are the same thing.

Can I get a channel's videos without knowing its playlist id? Yes, use the channel scraper linked above.

Is scraping YouTube legal? This reads public and unlisted playlist pages, nothing signed in. Results can still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. Apify's scheduler, or start it from the API and read the dataset when it finishes.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Include the playlist link or id you used and the run ID, and the log is enough for us to see what happened.