Home / Playlist Downloader
📋 Batch Media Tool

Download YouTube Playlists (Up to 50 Items)

Queue complete music albums, lecture courses, and tutorial series in MP3 or MP4 with automated track extraction via yt-dlp.

📋 Up to 50 Tracks Automatic Expansion 🎵 MP3 or MP4 Preset Formats 🚫 No Ads Zero Popups 🔒 24h Auto-Purge Private Cache
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Notice: Please only archive playlists containing media you have permission to download, such as educational courses, public domain collections, or your own channel backups.

📋 Paste Playlist URL

📋 Mode Download Entire Playlist

Playlist Download Queue 0

No active playlist downloads

Paste a playlist link above to start processing.

How YouTube Playlist Extraction Works

When you submit a playlist URL (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrEnWoR732-...), our system processes it through a dedicated pipeline designed to be fast, memory-safe, and resilient:

  1. Flat Metadata Scraping: Instead of fetching heavy video players and comments, our backend invokes yt-dlp with the extract_flat: True flag. This extracts video IDs, titles, durations, and thumbnail links in a single HTTP payload without downloading any media.
  2. Batch Job Generation: Each video entry is registered as an individual record in our thread-safe SQLite database with state QUEUED and unique UUID.
  3. Worker Dispatch: Our multi-threaded executor picks up jobs across 3 concurrent worker threads. As each video finishes, the next queued video starts automatically.
  4. Real-time UI Synchronization: The browser polls /api/jobs to render real-time progress bars, download speeds (MB/s), and download buttons for each finished item.

The 50-Item Safety Cap Explained

Our playlist downloader caps extraction at 50 videos per playlist. This limit exists for three critical reasons:

  • Rate Limiting & Anti-Bot Protection: YouTube strictly throttles IP addresses that request hundreds of video streams in rapid succession, resulting in temporary HTTP 429 Too Many Requests errors. A 50-item limit ensures clean, reliable completions.
  • Local Disk & Memory Protection: A 100-video playlist in 1080p could easily exceed 40 gigabytes of disk space and exhaust server memory during parallel FFmpeg muxing.
  • Session Reliability: Keeping batches at or below 50 items guarantees that all downloads finish well within typical network availability windows.
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Need More Than 50 Items? If you are downloading a 150-video course, you can split your download by using our Bulk URL Downloader, or self-host our repository and increase MAX_PLAYLIST_ITEMS in your local .env configuration file.

Public, Unlisted, and Private Playlist Behavior

Understanding playlist privacy rules on YouTube:

Playlist Type Supported? Behavior
Public Playlist ✅ Yes Extracts all videos up to 50 items with metadata.
Unlisted Playlist ✅ Yes Works completely as long as the full shareable URL is provided.
Private Playlist ❌ No Fails with error. Requires account login cookies (not supported for security).
YouTube Mix / Radio (RD...) ⚠️ Single Only Mixes are algorithmic dynamic streams. System automatically queues the current video instead.

Automatic Duplicate Filtration

It is common for playlists to contain duplicate videos or for users to accidentally paste a link that is already in the download queue. Our system inspects the normalized video ID of every incoming URL:

  • If a video is already in the active batch or currently downloading, duplicate instances are skipped.
  • Failed downloads can be retried individually using the 🔄 Retry button on the job card (supporting up to 3 automatic retries).

Step-by-Step Tutorial

Read our dedicated tutorial: How to Download a YouTube Playlist Step-by-Step for screenshots and advanced terminal tips.