PLDL

What it is

Download and research YouTube playlists. PLDL recovers the titles of deleted or private videos via the Wayback Machine, so your archive isn't full of mystery entries.

Why I built it

YouTube downloaders are easy to find online, and some of them let you download entire playlists. But they're typically web-based, on sketchy sites full of obnoxious ads. I wanted to build my own and expand on it for a specific use case. Years ago I created a massive playlist of videos shot on the PXL2000, the toy video camera Fisher-Price made. There were hundreds and hundreds of these on YouTube, and I wanted to gather them in one easy link for other PXL fans like me.

As the years went by, people deleted videos and made them private. I found myself curious - what were these missing videos? Could I still view them on archive sites, or at least research them enough to find out what the title was? PLDL is the result of that effort. I also wanted to try building an installable app for your computer, so PLDL is designed first as a web app, second as a downloadable DMG built with Tauri.

How it works

The web app is a Node and Express server that shells out to yt-dlp. It enumerates the full playlist - including the deleted and private entries YouTube normally hides - then downloads what's still live. For the missing ones, it queries the Wayback Machine to recover the original title and bracket roughly when the video disappeared. The same codebase packages into a native desktop app with Tauri, which wraps the Express server as a bundled sidecar and ships as a macOS DMG.

• Full playlist enumeration, including the deleted and private videos YouTube hides
• Wayback Machine title recovery for unavailable videos, with a deletion-window estimate
• Live download and recovery progress streamed to the browser over SSE
• Web app first, packaged as a Tauri desktop DMG second