yt-dlp automatically handles pagination

yt-dlp automatically handles pagination for YouTube playlists, even though the web interface displays videos in chunks of 100. It follows YouTube's internal API Innertube continuation tokens to retrieve the entire playlist without requiring you to write a manual pagination loop.

Here's how to use it with minimal Python code.

Simple Extraction Full List The key option is extract flat: True . This tells yt-dlp to extract only the list of videos without searching for detailed metadata for each one which would be very slow and unnecessary if you just want the URLs/titles .

Python

from yt dlp import YoutubeDL

PLAYLIST URL = "

options =

'extract flat': True, Only extracts surface info title, id, URL

'quiet': True,

with YoutubeDL options as ydl:

result = ydl.extract info PLAYLIST URL, download=False

videos = result.get 'entries',

print f"Total retrieved: len videos videos"

for video in videos:

print f" video.get 'playlist index', '?' . video 'title' video 'id' " If you also want the data for each video duration, views, etc. If you need the complete details for each video, remove 'extract flat': True, but be patient: yt-dlp will then make as many requests as there are videos to query their respective pages.

python

options =

'quiet': True,

No 'extract flat' here = full extraction

Quick command-line check Before running your script, you can check that yt-dlp sees the entire playlist:

bash

yt-dlp --flat-playlist --print "% playlist index s - % title s % id s " "PLAYLIST URL" If the playlist contains 427 videos, you will see all 427 lines scroll; yt-dlp has paginated itself in the background.