Channels and playlists

A channel is spread across a handful of commands rather than one command with tab flags. channel reads the record, about reads the about panel, uploads streams the videos, feed reads the Atom feed, playlists lists the playlists, and items pages a playlist. Output is a table on a terminal and JSONL when piped; override with -o. See Output formats and the CLI reference.

The channel record

Every channel command accepts an @handle, a UC... channel id, or any channel URL:

ytb channel @MrBeast
ytb channel UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA
ytb channel "https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast"

The record is four blocks of the page merged into one thing. The metadata block has the id, the keywords, the RSS url and the list of countries the channel is available in. The microformat block has the crawler's view of the page and a schema.org ProfilePage. The header has the handle, the verified or artist badge, and the banner. The about panel is a second request, and it is the only place with the join date, the lifetime view count, the country written out, and the titles on the external links.

ytb channel @RickAstleyYT --no-about   # one request, no join date and no lifetime views

The external links come from mainEntity.sameAs in the ProfilePage, which lists all of them at once with no continuation, already unwrapped from YouTube's youtube.com/redirect wrapper. The about panel is read anyway when it is not turned off, because that is where the link titles are.

Subscriber counts are always rounded to three significant figures, wherever they are read from, so every record carries subscriber_count_is_approximate: true. There is no signed out surface that states an exact one.

Counting the uploads

The header and the about panel do not always agree about how many videos a channel has, and neither of them always agrees with the uploads playlist. --counts reads the four playlists derived from the channel id and prints the arithmetic:

$ ytb channel @RickAstleyYT --counts --fields handle,videos,counts
╭───────────────┬────────┬─────────────────────────────────────╮
│ HANDLE        │ VIDEOS │ COUNTS                              │
├───────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
│ @RickAstleyYT │ 435    │ 139 + 294 + 2 = 435 uploads, agrees │
╰───────────────┴────────┴─────────────────────────────────────╯

Long form plus shorts plus past streams should come to the uploads playlist, because the three partition it. The page said 433 videos while the uploads playlist holds 435, so the playlist wins and via records what it beat. It costs four requests, which is why it is a flag and not the default.

Uploads

ytb uploads @MrBeast                  # everything, newest first
ytb uploads @MrBeast --kind shorts    # just the shorts
ytb uploads @MrBeast --kind streams   # past live streams
ytb uploads @MrBeast --kind popular   # most viewed first

There are two routes to these rows and --via picks between them. The default reads the playlist derived from the channel id, and the alternative reads the channel tab you would click on the site. The playlist is the default because no tab lists a channel's uploads: the Videos tab is long form only, so --kind all --via tab has nothing to read and says so instead of returning less.

A listing row is a listing row either way. It has a title, a duration, a rounded view count and a relative date like "4 days ago", and no description, no keywords and no like count. --enrich fans out one /player call per row to fill those in:

ytb uploads @MrBeast --enrich -j 8

Exact timestamps

"4 days ago" is what the listing gives you and it is all it gives you. The channel's Atom feed states a publication time to the second and an exact view count, for the fifteen newest uploads and no further. --exact reads it once and merges it in:

ytb uploads @RickAstleyYT --exact -n 20

Rows one to fifteen come back with a real timestamp. Rows sixteen and on keep the rounded text and say in missed that the feed does not reach them. If the newest fifteen are all you want, read the feed directly:

ytb feed @RickAstleyYT

The feed is also the only place outside the player that says whether a video is a short, which it does by linking to /shorts/ instead of /watch.

Paging and limits

-n/--limit caps the rows emitted and --max-pages caps the continuation pages fetched. Both default to unlimited, so a bare ytb uploads on a big channel walks the whole history:

ytb uploads @MrBeast -n 200
ytb uploads @MrBeast -o jsonl > mrbeast.jsonl

Narrow the columns with --fields, using the lowercase column names from the table header:

ytb uploads @MrBeast --fields title,views,published

Playlists

playlists lists what a channel has published:

ytb playlists @MrBeast

A channel can list its playlists on four different tabs and --kind picks one:

ytb playlists @RickAstleyYT --kind releases
ytb playlists @TED --kind podcasts
ytb playlists @TED --kind courses

releases is albums and singles, podcasts is shows, courses is course playlists. Most channels have only the plain playlists tab, and asking for one a channel does not have exits 3 and tells you which tabs it does have. The channel record carries the tab strip, so you can check first rather than guess:

ytb channel @TED | jq -r '.tabs[].slug'

playlist takes a playlist id or URL and prints its header, and items streams the videos in it, each with its position:

ytb playlist PLFgquLnL59alCl_2TQvOiD5Vgm1hCaGSI
ytb items PLFgquLnL59alCl_2TQvOiD5Vgm1hCaGSI -n 100

Resolving items to full metadata

Emit just the URLs with -o url and pipe them into video - to resolve each item to its full record:

ytb items PLFgquLnL59alCl_2TQvOiD5Vgm1hCaGSI -o url | ytb video -

Persisting

These commands stream and keep nothing. ytb crawl @handle writes the channel, its playlists, the videos they name and the claims that connect them into the local store. See The store.