VLC YouTube Playlist parser using youtube-dl

youtube-playlist_with_youtube-dl.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.
--]]

--[[
 Mfaizsyahmi 2021-06-01:
 Rewrote parse() to use youtube-dl
--]]

-- 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 handle = io.popen("youtube-dl -j --flat-playlist " .. vlc.path)
		local items = {}
		for item_json in handle:lines() do
			_, _, id = string.find(item_json, '"id": "([%w_\-]+)"')
			_, _, title = string.find(item_json, '"title": "([^"]+)"')
			table.insert(items, {path = "https://youtu.be/" .. id; name = title})
		end
		return items
	end
end

Because all of the parsers out there are in various states of brokenness, I resorted to use an external program, the one I know to work: youtube-dl. Obviously, you need to have youtube-dl installed.

The console window running youtube-dl will flash for a few seconds. Lua standard library has no control over this.