YouTube API "playlistItems" does not return all items of the "Uploaded" playlist

0
votes

I am wondering if anyone knows what could be the cause of this.

On a channel's upload playlist, it states there are 143 videos in the playlist:

enter image description here

When I use the "Playlistitems" API (with paging):

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/playlistItems/list

I get 138 items.

I have singled out a specific video that is in the Playlist on YouTube as an example. Video ID Q3UDhRDLbPg:

enter image description here

But when I use the "Playlistitems" API explorer, on the playlist and specify the specific video, I get zero results.

enter image description here

The video is public and was uploaded a few days ago. Some videos that were uploaded on the same day does exist in the results too.

Has anyone seen this problem before and might know the cause of it?

1
youtube-api
Indeed I can confirm that I myself did encountered precisely this behavior w.r.t. to a certain channel that am monitoring for quite some time: the Web UI showed a particular video as existing (on the channel's uploads playlist; but even on the home page https://www.youtube.com, where YouTube shows user-tailored recommendations), yet the PlaylistItems.list endpoint queried for that channel's uploads playlist did not returned that particular video. A week or so later, PlaylistItems.list did returned that video too. – stvar
Ah ok - I can wait a few days and see if it resolves automatically. – corgrath
But, even if this behavior seems to occur only temporarily (albeit one week is not transitory at all), I still deem this a bug of the API. Maybe the Google staff can shed more light on this if reporting it to them via their own issue tracker. – stvar

1 Answers

0
votes

This issue is solved.

As @stvar pointed out, there is some kind of a delay in YouTube's backend, some videos might take longer to be included than others.

All videos are accounted for now, 4 days after the upload time.