YouTube URL Extractor
Three honest jobs in one place: tidy YouTube links found in pasted text, pull the addresses out of a video description, and list the video URLs in a public playlist.
- You provide
- Pasted text containing YouTube links, a pasted video description, or a public video or playlist address.
- You receive
- Canonical video URLs, or the addresses written inside a description, with titles and order where available.
- Use it when
- Use it to tidy video links, collect the resources an author linked, or export a playlist as URLs.
Finding links in pasted text and pasted descriptions happens in this browser tab. Looking up a live video or playlist uses the official YouTube Data API from our server, and needs an API key to be configured.
What this tool cannot do
- Finding links in pasted text and in a pasted description works with no setup. Looking up a live video or playlist needs a YouTube Data API key configured for this site — if it is not, that mode shows an unavailable state rather than guessing.
- Private, unlisted and deleted playlist entries keep their position but have no address to give. They are counted and explained, not silently dropped.
- Playlist reads are paged 50 at a time and capped. If a playlist is longer, the result says so rather than pretending to be complete.
- This is a link tool. It does not download videos, produce MP4 addresses, or reach anything that is not public.
Which mode do you need?
Links in text takes anything you paste and finds the YouTube links inside it. A video can be linked half a dozen ways — youtube.com/watch?v=, youtu.be/, /shorts/, /embed/, /live/, with or without a timestamp, with or without playlist context. All of them are recognised and normalised to one canonical watch address, so the same video linked five different ways collapses into one row.
Description links gets the addresses an author wrote in the text under a video. Paste the description and it works immediately. Give us the video address instead and we ask YouTube for the description through its official API — which needs a key.
Playlist videos turns a public playlist into a list of video addresses, with titles and positions.
Hostname checking, properly
https://youtube.com.evil.example/watch?v=abc is not a YouTube link, and neither is https://notyoutube.com/watch?v=abc. Both would pass a naive "does it contain youtube" check.
Hostnames here are matched exactly against a fixed list: youtube.com, www.youtube.com, m.youtube.com, music.youtube.com, gaming.youtube.com, youtube-nocookie.com and youtu.be. Video ids must be exactly eleven characters from the set YouTube uses, and playlist ids must match the shapes YouTube issues. Anything on a YouTube host that carries no recognisable id is reported as such rather than turned into an address that looks plausible and goes nowhere.
Timestamps and playlist context
A link like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc&t=125s&list=PLxyz carries three pieces of information: the video, a start time, and the playlist you were in when you copied it.
By default the canonical address keeps only the video, so duplicates collapse properly — and every row where something was removed says exactly what was removed. Two checkboxes let you keep the start time, the playlist context, or both.
Frequently asked questions
Can I download videos with this?
No. This is a link tool. It collects and tidies addresses; it does not fetch media, produce MP4 links, or bypass anything. Searches for “YouTube URL extractor” often mean a downloader — this is not that, and saying so up front seems better than wasting your time.
Why does the playlist mode say it is not configured?
Because listing a playlist requires the official YouTube Data API, which requires an API key that the owner of this site has not set. The text mode works with no setup — if you already have the links in a document, paste them there.
What happens to private or deleted videos in a playlist?
They keep their position in the playlist but have no usable address, so they are counted and reported separately rather than quietly dropped. A playlist of 50 that returns 47 addresses will tell you that three entries were unavailable.
Are Shorts handled?
Yes. A `/shorts/<id>` address is recognised, labelled as a Short, and normalised to the canonical watch address for the same video.
Related tools
- You provide:
- Pasted text, or a local TXT, CSV, JSON or Markdown file.
- You receive:
- Every web address found, with its line number, in the order it appeared.
- Use it when:
- Use it when the links are sitting inside prose, an email, a chat log, a notes file or a data export.
- You provide:
- A list of URLs, one per line.
- You receive:
- The de-duplicated list, plus a preview of exactly which entries were removed and which entry they matched.
- Use it when:
- Use it after combining exports from several sources, or before importing a list somewhere that rejects duplicates.
- You provide:
- A list of URLs, one per line.
- You receive:
- The cleaned list, with a before/after view of every address that changed.
- Use it when:
- Use it before sharing links, publishing a reference list, or importing URLs that would otherwise carry campaign parameters.
- You provide:
- A list of URLs, or mixed text containing them.
- You receive:
- The hostname, or the registrable root domain, for each entry — with counts and an option to keep only unique values.
- Use it when:
- Use it to see which sites a link list actually points at, or to group thousands of URLs by domain.