How to get all the videos of a YouTube channel with the Yt gem? - ruby

Question

I want to use the Yt gem to get all the videos of channel. I configure the gem with my YouTube Data API key.
Unfortunately when I use it it returns a maximum of ~1000 videos, even for channels having more than 1000 videos. Yt::Channel#video_count returns the correct number of videos.
channel = Yt::Channel.new id: "UCGwuxdEeCf0TIA2RbPOj-8g"
channel.video_count # => 1845
channel.videos.map(&:id).size # => 949
The Youtube API can't be set to return more than 50 items per request, so I guess Yt automatically performs several requests going through each next page of results to be able to return more than 50 results.
For some reason though it does not go through all the result pages. I don't see a way in Yt for me to control how it goes through the pages of results. In particular I could not find a way to force it to get a single page of results, access the returned value nextPageToken, in order to perform a new request with this value.
Any idea?

Answer 1

Looking into gem's /spec folder, you can see a test for your code.
describe 'when the channel has more than 500 videos' do
let(:id) { 'UC0v-tlzsn0QZwJnkiaUSJVQ' }
specify 'the estimated and actual number of videos can be retrieved' do
# #note: in principle, the following three counters should match, but
# in reality +video_count+ and +size+ are only approximations.
expect(channel.video_count).to be > 500
expect(channel.videos.size).to be > 500
end
end
I did some tests and what I have noticed it that: video_count is the number that is displayed on youtube next to channel's name. This value is not accurate. Not rly sure what it represents.
If you do channel.videos.size, the number is not accurate either, because the videos collection can contain some empty(?) records.
If you do channel.videos.map(&:id).size the returned value should be correct. By correct I mean it should equal to number of videos listed at:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/:channel_id/videos