Question

YouTube has this cool thing that creates a “smart playlist” from some starting keywords. I would like to programmatically access the playlist. I’ve found the YouTube data API but it doesn’t discuss the “disco” feature.

One of the answers below suggests using

http://www.youtube.com/disco?action_search=1&query=XXXXXXXXX

that will return some JSON with the first video to be played, and a list property. Unfortunately, the list is a 32-character hex string, whereas normal playlist ID’s are 16-character hex strings. This means that the standard data API to retrieve the full playlist doesn’t work.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

First, I must say I I never used youtube data API, so I don’t know how useful below information will be.

Let me use an example:

I wanted to create Smashing Pumpkins. I typed the artist name and clicked the “Disco!” button. Using Fiddler2 I figured out the requested url was:

www.youtube.com/disco?action_search=1&query=smashing%20pumpkins

Notice, that spaces are replaced with %20. As a response i got simple JSON response:

{"url": "\/watch?v=bhMz7x1ZaGM\u0026feature=disco\u0026playnext=1\u0026list=MLGxdCwVVULXe5-F4X_zm6wnblRsnXoPJS"}

It was a link to the first song of freshly generated Smashing Pumpkins playlist, which address was list=MLGxdCwVVULXe5-F4X_zm6wnblRsnXoPJS. All you have to do know is replacing \u0026 with & and you get a valid link.

I assume the rest magic you want to do is available via official youtube data API.
I hope my research will help you.

EDIT

Well, it looks like this playlist generated by youtube/disco is not the same type of playlist that users can generate and that is available via API. The list ID is longer than usuall and when you click “More info about playlist” you are redirected to artists profile. Based on this two facts, i guess it’s impossible to retrive generated lists via API. Sorry.