This Mac Automation script extracts your YouTube watch later playlist into a CSV. It includes the following data about each video:
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videoURL
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videoTitle
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videoDuration
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videoDurationString
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videoThumbnail
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channelURL
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channelTitle
Before running the script, make sure you are signed in to YouTube on safari. Also make sure you have enabled Safari > Develop > Enable JavaScript from Apple Events. The script requires this because it injects javascript into YouTube's watch later page to automatically fetch new videos.
To run the script you can either:
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Run this command in the Command Line:
$ osascript -l JavaScript ./extract.applescript -
Or open the script in "Script Editor", change the language to JavaScript and run it.
Here's how the script works at a high-level:
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The script opens your watch later page in Safari and injects some JavaScript to periodically scroll the page down. This causes YouTube to fetch new videos if possible
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Once the script detects that there are no more videos, it scrapes the DOM for data about each video and saves it as a JSON file
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Using Python the script converts the JSON file into a CSV
The same general approach should work on other platforms too. You will just need to find a way to inject javascript into your browser and export data from it.