[Video Downloader] Allow Users to Download Entire YouTube Playlists

[arthurvrt]

Extension

https://www.raycast.com/vimtor/video-downloader

Description

Background

Currently, the extension allows users to download individual videos from YouTube. However, many users may want to download all the videos from a playlist in one go instead of downloading them one by one.

This feature would be particularly useful for users who want to archive content, download educational courses, or simply save time when dealing with large playlists.

Solutions

Here are some ideas on how this could be implemented. Feel free to share your thoughts!

1. Allow Playlist URLs in the Existing Input Field

• Instead of creating a separate action, the extension should detect when a playlist URL is entered in the existing input field.
• If the URL corresponds to a playlist, the extension should fetch the list of videos.

2. Handle Video Quality Selection for Playlists

• Since videos in a playlist may have different available qualities, we need to decide how to handle quality selection:
• Ask the user to choose a quality for each video individually.
• Only offer quality options that are available for all videos in the playlist.
• This could be configurable in the extension preferences.

3. Show a Download Progress Indicator

• Since playlists can contain many videos, adding a progress indicator would help users track ongoing downloads.
• A status update (e.g., “Downloading video X of Y”) could be displayed.

4. (Bonus) Allow Users to Choose Between Video and Audio Downloads

• As a more general improvement (not necessarily related to playlists), users could have the option to select whether they want to download videos or extract only the audio.

I can start working on a proof of concept by integrating playlist handling with yt-dlp, which already supports playlist downloads.

This would be my first contribution to this project, and I’d love to take it on! Looking forward to your feedback. 🚀

Who will benefit from this feature?

No response

Anything else?

No response

[raycastbot]

Thank you for opening this issue!

🔔 @vimtor @darmiel @ridemountainpig @remorses @LitoMore @anwarulislam you might want to have a look.

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[vimtor]

I think yt-dlp already supports playlists @LitoMore 👀

[arthurvrt]

I think yt-dlp already supports playlists @LitoMore 👀

It does, but it’s not working with the Raycast extension. I think some changes need to be made to the extension to enable playlist downloads

[LitoMore]

See its output:

# This even has no ending
yt-dlp --dump-json 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Xpaadt-RA&list=RDEM8WSMezX4Qc4JoWjOcIYWuQ'

It dumps multiple video objects in one process (not an array of videos).

Fetching all the data took a very long time, and we needed to separate the data manually.

It would be a terrible user experience with Raycast. I would suggest using the CLI directly to download playlists.