[Question] Get youtube-dl compatible URLs from playlists

[Babbie]

Make sure you are using the latest version: run youtube-dl --version and ensure your version is 2017.03.16. If it's not read this FAQ entry and update. Issues with outdated version will be rejected.

• I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2017.03.16

Before submitting an issue make sure you have:

• At least skimmed through README and most notably FAQ and BUGS sections
• Searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones

What is the purpose of your issue?

• Bug report (encountered problems with youtube-dl)
• Site support request (request for adding support for a new site)
• Feature request (request for a new functionality)
• Question
• Other

---

Description of your issue, suggested solution and other information

I am currently making a Discord bot that will use youtube-dl to obtain music files and play them from URLs (so the usual). To make this a little easier, I wanted to run a command with youtube-dl to obtain URLs from a playlist, so I could perform individual handling on each entry in such a playlist. The problem is that, at least with YouTube playlists, the (two) URLs that are returned per video will not work if they are then supplied to youtube-dl again, presumably due to some security handling. My question is: How do I get youtube-dl compatible URLs out of a playlist using youtube-dl? Of course, I want to avoid having to manually insert the correct URL before the video ID (eg. prepending http://youtube.com/v/ to the ID) as this would bloat my code significantly and make it much more difficult to keep it up to date with new services added to youtube-dl.

For a concrete example:
I want to run something like

youtube-dl --get-url https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWAMgeSbi1zHcUg7V8g9gCaGzIR0APqG7

and then run

youtube-dl <url>

on the individual URLs that are returned, separately, but the URLs that are returned cannot do this (they always return errors)

[dstftw]

Provide concrete example with concrete URLs of what are you trying to do.

[Babbie]

Updated.

[dstftw]

--flat-playlist --dump-json and parse from JSON.

[Babbie]

I did not realise that only an ID is sufficient for YouTube specifically. Thanks for the heads-up and sorry for the superfluous issue.