avoid downloading videos for data-mining purposes

[mathematicalmichael]

Checklist

• I'm asking a question
• I've looked through the README and FAQ for similar questions
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar questions including closed ones

Question

It seems like youtube-dl is a great tool for the following task:

• given a channel name,
• find all videos and playlists
• compile them into a list of hyperlinks

for use-cases such as mine (where I do not need to download the videos but do need the hyperlinks) in order to scrape data from each video (description/likes/length, etc).

My question is, how can this be accomplished (the avoiding downloads part)? Is there already some sort of syntax pattern to accomplish this? I could not find such a thing in the documentation, and trying to parse data using tools like BeautifulSoup for python only grab the first 100 videos per playlist.

I have found syntax in youtube-dl to grab all videos from a channel, but again, I don't want to download them, just save the hyperlinks to a file.

[dstftw]

Have you even read FAQ?

--skip-download                  Do not download the video