DOESN'T WORK ANYMORE - for workaround see https://gist.github.com/p3g4asus/597050997e01f8fd1fcf473fe6545a4fModified VLC YouTube playlist parsing script to support playlists with more than 200 videos. Verified it works with 1000+ videos, no duplicates and all included (minus deleted videos). Official version claims to support 100+, but actually o…

0 Warning.md

YouTube broke this

If you're looking for a fix, see fork https://gist.github.com/p3g4asus/597050997e01f8fd1fcf473fe6545a4f

It works around this by using youtube-dl, since the lua http interface for VLC is not expressive enough to create a proper fix.

149909-playlist_youtube.lua

--[[
 Youtube playlist importer for VLC media player 1.1 and 2.0
 Copyright 2012 Guillaume Le Maout

 Authors:  Guillaume Le Maout
 Contact: http://addons.videolan.org/messages/?action=newmessage&username=exebetche

 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 (at your option) any later version.

 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 GNU General Public License for more details.

 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston MA 02110-1301, USA.
--]]

--[[
 MODified by Kai Gillmann, 19.01.2013, kaigillmann@googlemail.com:
 VLC HAS already a youtube importer, but not for playlists. IMO this mentioned one is
 better than this one, because it opens the video in the best possible video resolution.
 So i decided to remove all parts of the code which is not responsible for list handling.
 Now this lua script parses the list, as wanted, but for each video opened, the vlc default
 Youtube script is used, so the videos will be displayed properly.
--]]

--[[
 Patched by Aaron Hill (https://github.com/seraku24), 2018-05-16:
 The original script was failing in VLC 3.x due to an overzealous probe function.
 This patch makes the probe function more restrictive to avoid false positives.
--]]

-- Helper function to get a parameter's value in a URL
function get_url_param( url, name )
     local _, _, res = string.find( url, "[&?]"..name.."=([^&]*)" )
     return res
end

-- Probe function.
function probe()
     if vlc.access ~= "http" and vlc.access ~= "https" then
	     return false
     end

     return string.match(vlc.path:match("([^/]+)"),"%w+.youtube.com") and (
			 not string.match(vlc.path, "list_ajax") and string.match(vlc.path, "[?&]list="))
end

-- Parse function.
function parse()
	if string.match( vlc.path, "list=" ) then
		local playlist_parsed, playlistData, line, s, item
		local p = {}
		local id_ref = {}
		local index = 0
		local playlistID = get_url_param( vlc.path, "list" )
		local videoID = get_url_param( vlc.path, "v" )
		local playlistURL = "https://www.youtube.com/list_ajax?action_get_list=1&style=xml&list="..playlistID
		local prevLoaded = 0

		while true do
			playlistData = ""
			line = ""
			s = nil
			s = vlc.stream(playlistURL.."&index="..index)
			while line do
				playlistData = playlistData..line
				line = s:readline()
			end

			playlist_parsed = nil
			playlist_parsed = parse_xml(playlistData).root.video
			if playlist_parsed == nil then
				playlist_parsed = {}
			end

			for i, video in ipairs(playlist_parsed) do
				if not id_ref[video.encrypted_id.CDATA] then

					vlc.msg.dbg(i.." "..video.encrypted_id.CDATA)
					id_ref[video.encrypted_id.CDATA] = true
					
					item = nil
					item = {}

					if video.encrypted_id
					and video.encrypted_id.CDATA then
						item.path = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v="..video.encrypted_id.CDATA
					end

					if video.title
					and video.title.CDATA then
						item.title = video.title.CDATA
					end

					if video.artist
					and video.artist.CDATA then
						item.artist = video.artist.CDATA
					end

					if video.thumbnail
					and video.thumbnail.CDATA then
						item.arturl = video.thumbnail.CDATA
					end

					if video.description
					and video.description.CDATA then
						item.description = video.description.CDATA
					end

					--~ item.rating = video.rating
					table.insert (p, item)

				end
			end
			if #p > prevLoaded or index == 100 then
				vlc.msg.dbg("Playlist-Youtube: Loaded " ..#p.. " videos...")
				index = index + 100
				prevLoaded = #p
			else
				vlc.msg.dbg("Playlist-Youtube: Finished loading " ..#p.. " videos!")
				return p
			end
		end
	end
end


function parse_xml(data)
	local tree = {}
	local stack = {}
	local tmp = {}
	local tmpTag = ""
	local level = 0

	table.insert(stack, tree)

	for op, tag, attr, empty, val in string.gmatch(
		data,
		"<(%p?)([^%s>/]+)([^>]-)(%/?)>[%s\r\n\t]*([^<]*)[%s\r\n\t]*") do
		if op=="?" then
			--~ DOCTYPE
		elseif op=="/" then
			if level>0 then
			level = level - 1
			table.remove(stack)
			end
		else
		level = level + 1

		if op=="!" then
			stack[level]['CDATA'] = vlc.strings.resolve_xml_special_chars(
			string.gsub(tag..attr, "%[CDATA%[(.+)%]%]", "%1"))
			attr = ""
			level = level - 1
		elseif type(stack[level][tag]) == "nil" then
			stack[level][tag] = {}
			table.insert(stack, stack[level][tag])
		else
			if type(stack[level][tag][1]) == "nil" then
			 tmp = nil
			 tmp = stack[level][tag]
			 stack[level][tag] = nil
			 stack[level][tag] = {}
			 table.insert(stack[level][tag], tmp)
			end
			tmp = nil
			tmp = {}
			table.insert(stack[level][tag], tmp)
			table.insert(stack, tmp)
			end

			if val~="" then
			stack[level][tag]['CDATA'] = {}
			stack[level][tag]['CDATA'] = vlc.strings.resolve_xml_special_chars(val)
			end

			if attr ~= "" then
			stack[level][tag]['ATTR'] = {}
				string.gsub(attr,
				"(%w+)=([\"'])(.-)%2",
				function (name, _, value)
				 stack[level][tag]['ATTR'][name] = value
				end)
			end

			if empty ~= "" then
				level = level - 1
				table.remove(stack)
			end
		end
	end
	return tree
end

Oh nice find. This API is apparently still open for both the desktop and mobile domain. Quick tests show it'll work just fine, even without cookies. You do need custom headers though with stuff extractred from the page (take a look at yt_getRequestHeadersYoutube without the cookie parameter).
Then, in javascript terms, the following returns the correct result you can parse:

fetch("https://youtube.com/playlist?ctoken=" + conToken + "&pbj=1", {
	method: "GET",
	headers: yt_getRequestHeadersYoutube("application/x-www-form-urlencoded", false)
});

Pretty easy. Although I wouldn't trust on it working forever, since they seem to be moving towards a different interface now (same but with POST, with a generic key in the query and the conToken in the body).

Unfortunately even this type of GET is impossible to reproduce with vlc lua API. I just realized that it supports only customizing referrer and user agent in http GET requests. And unfortunately additional x-youtube headers are mandatory. GET requests without them do not work. Would it be possible to make a simple GET request to FlagPlayer web interface to obtain youtube playlist details in json format?
Thanks in advance

That is quite worrying. I'd recommend creating an issue on VLC to try to fix this, because setting headers should really be in their radar.
Technically you could write a server that does these requests for you, but it'd be a lot of rewriting for the one I'm using and I'd have to open it up to other sources, which is generally a bad idea for puplic cors servers which so many options enabled as I have.
And finally, even if you did, YouTube has IP matching protection enabled on some copyrighted videos - VLC wouldnt be able to play back the URL you get, which means you'd have to stream the audio/video file over that server as well.
While there is really no sensible reason hlto have a separate server running for a host application like VLC. For a website, sure, they have unavoidable restrictions set by the browser, but in this case I'd push towards VLC improving their web request interface.

You are definitely right. I did not think about the implications my request would have. VLC http interface should definitely be extended to support at least setting headers. Before they add that support, playing youtube palylist will be nearly impossible.
The only way I can think of is using os.execute() api to execute:
youtube-dl -j --flat-playlist "https://<yourYoutubePlaylist>" > outfile.txt
and parsing outfile.txt
Obviously it will be ugly, slow and it will need youtube-dl.exe to be copied in the same dir as the lua playlist plugin file. But it should work. I will try this solution and I will post it when ready.

Here you can find the updated version of this playlist script.
Disclaimer: this version works only under Windows. It can be easily ported but I have no way to test it on other OS at the moment.
Installation (under Windows): place this file in the lua playlist vlc folder together with JSON.lua and youtube-dl.exe

Looking good, will try it out later and somehow attempt to forward everyone there.
(Btw currently there seem to be two copies of the script in there)

@p3g4asus is it broken OR is it due to some youtube api updates recently?
doesn't seem to work for me though..
Stay Strong

@p3g4asus is it broken OR is it due to some youtube api updates recently?
doesn't seem to work for me though..
Stay Strong

It still does work for most videos. I recommend you keep your youtube-dl executable file updated downloading it periodically from its official website