How to Download All the Videos on Your YouTube Channel
1) Get all URLs. 2) Download Videos from URLs
SUMMARY:
Are you like Angela, at ParkRose Permaculture, who has a lot of Videos on your YouTube Channel, but you don’t have your own copies of the videos? If something happens to your channel, you may lose all your videos!
If you would like to dowload backups all the videos on a YouTube, here are some basic instructions:
How to Backup A YouTube Channel
Get List of All Video URLs: Example: ParkRose Permaculture: 5,315 URLs
DETAIL:
Mac YouTube Download: Downie
If you want to download YouTube videos, and have a Mac, check out “Downie” by Charlie Monroe Software2 (no relation). In addition to YouTube Downie also downloads videos on other sites, such as Vimeo, Twitch, TED, Rumble, X, Facebook, and Instagram.
One important thing about Downie is that it accepts a list of video URLs, so that you can download multiple URLs in one batch.
How to Generate a List of Videos
WARNING: This next section is more technical. I ran this process manually for Parkrose Permaculture so they don’t have to bother with this.3
Here’s a series of Gemini prompts to generate a list of “Parkrose Permaculture” videos:
Q: Are you familiar with the YouTube Channel “Parkrose Permaculture” https://www.youtube.com/@ParkrosePermaculture
A: Yes, I am familiar with Parkrose Permaculture.
It is a popular channel run by Angela, who shares her nearly three decades of experience in permaculture, sustainable living, and gardening. The channel focuses on her family-run farmette, which is set on a 1/4-acre lot located in Portland, Oregon. She covers a variety of topics, including fruit tree guild design, urban homesteading, food forests, chicken keeping, and bee stewardship.
Are you looking for a specific video, topic, or recommendation from her channel?
Q: Are you able to generate a list of URLs for all the videos for the YouTube Channel?
No, I cannot generate a comprehensive list of URLs for every individual video on the channel. “Parkrose Permaculture” has uploaded over 5,300 videos, which exceeds the amount of data that can be compiled and displayed in a single text response.
However, you can easily browse or search through her entire video catalog directly on YouTube. To see all her uploaded content in chronological order, you can visit the Parkrose Permaculture Uploads Playlist, which automatically updates and serves as a complete archive of the channel’s video history.
Q: Can you split the list of videos in smaller batches, such as 100 videos per batch?
A: Even when broken down into smaller batches of 100, generating the URLs for over 5,300 videos isn’t possible here. I don’t have a backend database or direct API access to scrape, store, and paginate YouTube’s live servers to pull that massive volume of links for you.
As an AI, I can retrieve a small handful of specific links if you are looking for a particular topic (like her videos on chicken keeping, fruit tree guilds, or bee stewardship), but I can’t generate bulk archives.
Command-line Tool: yt-dlp
If you need a complete, structured dataset of all her video URLs for a project, your best bet is to use a free command-line tool like yt-dlp to extract the metadata yourself. Running a simple command like this in your terminal will output a text file of every URL in just a couple of minutes:
yt-dlp --flat-playlist --print url https://www.youtube.com/@ParkrosePermaculture > videos.txt
# Slow down request using “sleep” to avoid YouTube limiting how many videos can be retrieved:
yt-dlp --flat-playlist --sleep-requests 1 --print url https://www.youtube.com/@ParkrosePermaculture > all_parkrose_videos.txt
Result: all_parkrose_videos.txt
HowTo Download Videos
Once you have that text file listing all video URLs, you can easily split it into batches of 100 using any basic text editor or spreadsheet tool.
About Me:
I’m Tim Langeman. I learned how to handle YouTube videos programmatically while working on one my passions — a citation tool called CiteIt. The app enables writers to build trust and educate readers by looking up the context of writers’ quotations. I hope to pitch the App to Substack so that every Substack writer can build reader trust by easily showing their readers the context of their citations. CiteIt enables writers to quote from webpages, YouTube Video transcripts, and PDFs5. (Demo). If you’re interested in trying it out, feel free to send me an email: contact@citeit.net
P.S. I also run a Substack site: writing.openpolitics.com
FOOTNOTES:
If you know a similar Windows tool or script provide a link into the comments
I have no connection to Charlie Monroe Software and I receive no money from them. I just found them useful and easy to use. It is also possible to do this from the command line but many people do not know how to install python modules like yt-dlp.
Let me know whether there would be demand for me to setup an automated service to generate a list of all your YouTube Channel’s video URLs. Would you be willing to pay for this? How much would this be worth? I did this for free for ParkRose Permaculture, but it required manual processing. For me to automate this for anyone who wants would require extra work.
Start out by downloading one video at a time, then increase the batch size to 10, 100, 500, 1000. Figure out how long the downloading process takes at each step and then spot check that the downloaded videos are correct. Then increase the batch size. You don’t want to overwhelm you computer by requesting 5000+ videos at the outset.
PDF support is not yet mature, but the App is designed to quote from digital text PDFs generated by computer, as well as scanned PDFs.