Wager Extensions

GuidesPlaylist Exporter for YouTube

Export your YouTube Watch Later list

Watch Later is the hardest YouTube list to get out. It is private to your account, the YouTube Data API returns it empty, and Google Takeout often leaves it out. What works is reading it from YouTube while you are signed in.

Why the usual routes come back empty

Watch Later has the fixed playlist ID WL. Since 2016 the YouTube Data API has returned an empty list for it, so scripts and sites built on the API cannot see it. Google Takeout exports the playlists you created; Watch Later is a system list, and many people find it missing from the archive. Even when a playlist is there, Takeout gives you video IDs and dates, not titles.

By hand, for a short list

Open youtube.com/playlist?list=WL, scroll until the last video has loaded, and copy the titles across. That is fine for twenty videos and tedious for two hundred.

yt-dlp with your browser's cookies

yt-dlp can list Watch Later if it borrows the cookies of a browser where you are signed in to YouTube:

yt-dlp --flat-playlist --cookies-from-browser firefox --print "%(title)s;%(url)s" "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL" > watch-later.txt

On Windows it has had trouble reading Chrome's cookie store since Chrome changed how it encrypts cookies in 2024, which is why the example points at Firefox. The other route is a cookies.txt file exported from the browser you use. Either way you are handing a command-line tool your YouTube sign-in, so use a copy you downloaded from the project itself.

With Playlist Exporter for YouTube (Pro)

Watch Later is one of the Pro features of my extension, along with every row of long playlists and the Excel format. It reads the list from your own signed-in tab, so your sign-in never leaves the browser.

  1. Sign in to YouTube in the same browser.
  2. Open youtube.com/playlist?list=WL, or Watch Later under You in the side menu.
  3. Click the toolbar icon and pick CSV, Excel, JSON or Markdown. The popup scans the list and the file downloads.
The Playlist Exporter popup on the Watch Later page, saying you are signed out of YouTube and that private playlists, Watch Later and Liked videos need you signed in
Signed out, the popup says why the list is empty. Signed in with Pro, the same popup exports Watch Later like any other playlist. Without Pro it says that Watch Later is a Pro feature.

It does not remove anything from Watch Later after exporting; the list stays as it was.

Updated 15 October 2026.