Getting YouTube-dl to archive a whole channel, without download videos

Question

I'm trying to get Youtube-dl to make an archive list of all the videos on a specified channel. I've got it doing that by downloading videos at the lowest quality, but I was wondering if there was a way to just get the id and archive it - without having to download like 4500+ videos

This is what I have currently. It downloads the videos to a separate folder. the ffmpeg bit on the end probably isn't needed, but it's left over from another command I know works.

youtube-dl.exe --download -i -f worst --download-archive Archive.txt https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH-_hzb2ILSCo9ftVSnrCIQ -o "E:\Video\YTDL\%(title)s.%(ext)s" --ffmpeg-location "%CD%\ffmpeg\bin" I tried --simulate and --skip-download, but that just results in nothing happening in the cmd...

Answer 1

A valid Archive.txt file contains the word "youtube" followed by the video id. One video per line...

youtube AB1cD2eF3Gh
youtube iJ4KL5MN6OP
youtube QR7StUvWxYz

You can extract a list of video ids from a channel/playlist using...

youtube-dl --get-id <channel/playlist url>

...then create your own Archive.txt file, which contains "youtube <video id>" (one per line).

Then the normal "--download-archive Archive.txt" will work.

Answer 2

You can try:

youtube-dl --skip-download --write-description --write-info-json --write-annotations --write-thumbnail --write-all-thumbnails --write-sub --write-auto-sub <url>

where:

--write-description              Write video description to a .description file
--write-info-json                Write video metadata to a .info.json file
--write-annotations              Write video annotations to a .annotations.xml file
--write-thumbnail                Write thumbnail image to disk
--write-all-thumbnails           Write all thumbnail image formats to disk
--write-sub                      Write subtitle file
--write-auto-sub                 Write automatically generated subtitle file (YouTube only)