youtube playlist changes

[mauritius]

Hello,
I want to write a script which runs in the background and monitores changes in a youtube playlist that i'm interested in.
I have some trouble getting a list of videos in that playlist. When I want to download it, i get an accept-cookies page instead of the playlist content.
What's interesting - when i want to download a single video content (like title, description) I have no problem.
I use below code from this tread:

Code: Select all

MsgBox, % YouTubeTitle("https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ")
return

YouTubeTitle(url) {
	hObject := ComObjCreate("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1")
	hObject.Open("GET", url)
	hObject.Send()
	RegExMatch(hObject.ResponseText, "(?<=title>).*?(?= - YouTube</title>)", title)
	return title
}

I'm pretty sure that many of you have much experience with retrieving data from youtube so if you could point me in some direction i'd be thankful.

[Mod action: Moved topic from AHK v2 help to v1 help, based on posted code.]

[teadrinker]

The only reliable way to get information from YouTube is to use the YouTube API.

[malcev]

For getting information from google services without authentication You dont need to use their api.
Just look at browser network what You send and try to repeat it with ahk.

[teadrinker]

But why? It's much easier to get a key and use the documented API.

[malcev]

For example if You want to develop it for other users - You will need to share Your private key (not recommended) or get approve from google for Your application.

[teadrinker]

I'd just advise other users to get their own key. Hacking in this case is not the best option, as you'll have to redo the script every time the site changes.

[malcev]

Yes, the main disadvantage of not using their api that google periodically changes its checks.
If 2 years ago we needed to send "CONSENT=YES" cookie, now we need to send SOCS=... cookie, as I see.

[teadrinker]

Yes, and for this case you don't even have to bother with OAuth 2.0 authorization, a key is enough.

[mauritius]

I just want to thank everyone who answered in this thread. I managed to succeed and I did my first script using API Thanks, good ahk people, I can always count on you!

I want just to add that this api was a bit weird... One api request only returned 20* videos per request. And to get 200th video in a playlist you couldn't ask for positions 181-200. No. You needed to ask 10 times for earlier videos (which were not interesting for you at all) to get the last position. There were some quotas of requests to api. I didn't used it all, but i can imagine it would be different if playlist was composed of 500 or 800 videos... That's weird.. But anyway - thanks again guys.

* if i recall correctly

[teadrinker]

One api request only returned 20* videos per request

I see that there is a maxResults key that allows you to specify the number of results in the output, up to 50.