One of the things I wish I could solve better, was a way to search for and show decent search results that you could then pipe into `yt-dlp`. Every method of doing this I've seen is basically a "hack" and often breaks or doesn't work at all. Anyone have a better solution to this that lets you basically build a frontend/proxy to Youtube or lets you Search, Show results and Download what you want to see lateR?

>, was a way to search for and show decent search results

Not sure what you're exactly asking for. Google/Youtube does provide an "official" API for youtube searches:

https://developers.google.com/youtube/data/reference/rest/v3...

It's rate-limited but other hacks to scrape Youtube without the API will also be rate-limited as well unless you try to trick Google via unapproved hostile methods such as commanding an army of residential ip zombies and aggregate it.

Fundamentally, the index of Youtube videos lives in Google's servers so you're beholden to Google to get results from it. If the issue is that the Google's official results from search queries are not surfacing the videos you think are actually there, it means you'd have to build a duplicate (massive) "shadow" index to return those missing videos. To build such a beast, you're back to hitting the brick wall of rate-limits again.

https://github.com/offline-ant/await-clipboard/blob/main/awa...

A script that streams clipboard changes.

Next i run a bunch of user services that do:

`await-clipboard.sh | grep --line-buffered -z -e "youtu" | ...`

I just use youtube like normal, but instead of clicking a video i right-click copy to clipboard and a mpv+sponsorblock window pops up

What hacks have you found? I guess my first thought is some sort of snippet to run in the browser console, or an extension, that you can just run when using youtube itself that copies the yt-dlp command to downloads all the page's search results to your clipboard. Definitely a hack I'm just curious what else you've seen.

   copy(
     'yt-dlp ' +
     [...document.querySelectorAll('ytd-video-renderer a#video-title')]
       .map(a => {
         const u = new URL(a.href);
         return `"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=${u.searchParams.get('v')}"`;
       })
       .join(' ')
   )

I was messing around with the new coding agent in Xcode and built an app that would let me put in a bunch of channels I subscribe to, then basically made a YouTube RSS app around that. It would fetch new videos and show the thumbnails, times, descriptions, etc. If I wanted to watch something it will download it with yt-dlp on the backend. Watched videos would get cleaned up periodically, but videos marked as favorites would stick around.

It worked decently well. However, I started running into API limits when it would refresh to fetch updates. Things could likely be tweaked to avoid this, but I haven’t revisited it yet.

I didn’t make a generic search, but did allow pulling up one-off videos to download and favorite them.

Due to the nature of youtube updating so often all methods utilizing youtube's search would break often, but in the age of coding agents I don't think it matters as much anymore. Tell that to claude code and it will do it in 15 minutes. Being annoyed with youtube's search interface regressions I've basically built something similar by having an alternative frontend to better sort by date ranges, view count etc. It has already broken twice in last 6 months but fixing it is trivial by pointing a coding agent at it. The way it works is by piping the search query to automated playwright browser which returns the parsed search results and thumbnails. Also dabbled with Youtube's API in the past which sometimes shows results that don't show up on its regular search.

I used a self-hosted Invidious instance in the past. Im not sure of the current state, but it’s a privacy front end similar to redlib.

> Anyone have a better solution

Since youtube api won't help with this someone needs to build a video index and a good search algorithm on top. Would be nice to be able to search through indexed subtitles too.

i use freetube to search. i can select videos that i want to watch with a single click into a playlist and then export that playlist and feed it to yt-dlp. since my internet is often slow, that is the main way i watch videos. i don't even open them directly in freetube, but wait until yt-dlp is done downloading.

Podsync will download videos from a playlist and then publish an XML feed of videos it's downloaded. You can set it up so that you interact with it by just adding videos to a (public or unlisted) playlist.

It's intended to be used as a youtube-to-podcast-player tool, but seems like it fits your use, too.

You can use google site search operator to get a better youtube search

> and often breaks

That's kinda the nature of YouTube downloaders/scrapers including yt-dlp. It's not exactly a public API that YouTube's offering to support.