Migrate YouTube Data

Viewers only, not for creators

Automatically gets subscribed channels, personal playlists and saved playlists from the old account.

Ensures the new account:

• subscribes to all the channels with confirmation prompts
• has all personal playlists created with the same title and videos with confirmation prompts
• has all the saved playlists added (WebDriver Automation)

Pre-requisites

• Ruby
  • gem install google-api-client or see Quickstart guide
• YouTube credentials created and saved to auth/ for an OAuth application named YouTube Data Migration
  • auth/old_account_client_secret.json
  • auth/new_account_client_secret.json
• YouTube Data API v3 enabled on Google APIS Dashboard
• (Optional) Python for saving playlist data and cookies – see below
• The new account has a Channel

Subscriptions and Personal Playlists

Run ruby migrate.rb and authenticate your old and new accounts. Confirm each step when prompted.

Alternatively run YES_TO_ALL=true ruby migrate.rb to avoid being prompted.

Saved Playlists

There's no API for managing saved playlists, so we extract them from web traffic data and use web driver for adding them.

Retrieving The Playlists

You can save the data yourself (using a browser and its developer console) or use a proxy server.

For automatically getting saved playlists data with mitmproxy:

1. pip install mitmproxy and trust the certs
2. In the project root, run mitmproxy -s ./proxy/save-playlists.py to start the proxy server
3. Configure proxy settings in your favourite browser for HTTPS traffic and set the server to localhost:8080
4. Navigate to your personal YouTube Saved Playlist page and keep scrolling until all playlists are displayed. The URL should be like something like https://www.youtube.com/user/<username>/playlists?view=52&sort=dd&shelf_id=0
5. Don't browse any other YouTube page. Quit mitmproxy as soon as possible to avoid saving incorrect data made by other AJAX requests.
6. Run ruby extract-playlists.rb. The saved-playlists.py automatically saves your data in data/ for extract-playlists.rb to process.

Adding The Playlists

There are two ways:

1. Go on a clicking frenzy. Mind your computer resources if you have lots of playlists!
   • Run grep ':id:' data/saved-playlists.yaml | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs -I"{}" open "https://youtube.com/playlist?list={}" (change the open command for your OS).
   • All playlists will be opened in your browser, you just have to click and Command + w until they're all saved.
2. Use Selenium and friends
   • gem install watir and grab the cookies from authenticated session for you new account with mitmproxy -s ./proxy/save-cookies.py
   • I use Safari. Ensure Develop > Allow Remote Automation is enabled.
   • Feel free to use other browsers but you have to ensure the driver is available and usable – see Watir guides
   • Or go headless
   • Run ruby add-saved-playlists.rb or YES_TO_ALL=true ruby add-saved-playlists.rb

FYI: Selenium Webdriver has never been the most reliable thing in the world. Timed out? just rerun.

Note

• Subscription list does not included suspended channels even if they are still shown on your sidebar
• Too lazy to use Bundler as we only use at most 2 Gems