YouTube Bulk Downloader — Channel, Shorts & Search
What BulkVid does for YouTube
YouTube is the world's largest video library — long-form uploads, Shorts, live replays, and multi-language channels spread across decades of content. BulkVid supports channel pagination (long videos or Shorts separately), keyword search with upload-date and duration filters, and bulk URL paste for watch links, Shorts links, and youtu.be short URLs. Every job ships a CSV manifest with title, view count, like count, duration, publish date, and channel id alongside each file.
YouTube stream URLs are not embedded in listing responses — BulkVid resolves playable MP4 lanes lazily at download time via TikHub's video info endpoint. You see metadata immediately in the grid; the worker fetches stream URLs when you click Download ZIP.
Channel mode — long videos or Shorts
Paste a @handle, UC… channel id, or full channel URL into the Channel tab. Use the Content Type dropdown to switch between Videos (long-form uploads) and Shorts — these are separate API endpoints with separate pagination cursors. BulkVid walks the selected catalog, surfaces every item in a sortable grid, and packs your selection into one ZIP.
Channel id rules differ by content type: long-form channel sweeps accept UC… ids; Shorts sweeps accept @handle or channel URL. The UI hint below the input explains which format works for your selection.
A channel with 200 Shorts typically finishes in 5–7 minutes. Long-form catalogs with hour-long uploads take longer per file because source sizes are larger. Pricing is flat 1 credit per video — YouTube does not expose a multi-tier quality picker on BulkVid; the worker picks the highest available MP4 lane from the representation list.
Optional language and country filters (ISO codes) narrow channel results when the API supports regional variants.
Bulk URL mode — watch, Shorts, and short links
Paste URLs into the Bulk tab — one per line:
youtube.com/watch?v={id}youtu.be/{id}youtube.com/shorts/{id}youtube.com/live/{id}(when replay is available)
BulkVid extracts the video id, resolves metadata and stream URL per item, and runs the parallel worker. Per-URL pricing is 3 credits — higher than channel mode because each link requires an independent API call.
Common workflow: a researcher paste 50 lecture URLs from a conference playlist. A Shorts curator collects 100 viral Shorts links from a trend report and downloads them in one ZIP with titles and view counts for ranking analysis.
Keyword search — long-form and Shorts
Switch to the Keywords tab, enter a search term, and choose Long Videos or Shorts as the search scope. Filters include upload date (hour / today / week / month / year), duration (short / medium / long), and sort order (relevance / date / view count / rating). Default region is gl=US&hl=en — adjust language and country codes when searching non-English content.
Results populate the same grid as Channel mode. Pricing is 1 credit per video returned. Useful for SEO researchers tracking keyword rankings, educators finding tutorial clusters, and content strategists monitoring competitor Shorts around specific topics.
Stream resolution and quality
YouTube's adaptive streaming exposes multiple representation lanes. BulkVid sorts candidates by resolution descending, then codec preference (H.264 > HEVC > AV1 for broad compatibility), then bitrate. DASH and HLS-only lanes are skipped when a direct MP4 progressive URL exists.
Duration is parsed from ISO-8601 (PT1H2M3S format) into seconds for the table column. View counts and like counts display when the API returns them; missing fields show "n/a".
CSV manifest — what ships in every ZIP
YouTube jobs export: video id, title, channel id, channel title, view count, like count, duration (seconds), publish date, and the canonical watch URL. Researchers sorting by view count in Excel can identify outliers in a keyword batch without re-querying the API. Shorts and long-form videos share the same manifest schema — filter by duration column to separate formats after download.
Use cases — who actually uses this
Educators archiving lecture series before playlist restructuring. Shorts creators studying competitor hook patterns across niches. Music analysts collecting cover-version clusters around a song title. Documentary researchers pulling interview clips cited in papers. Marketing teams downloading testimonial videos from client channels for offline editing.
How credits work
1 credit per video in channel and keyword mode. 3 credits per URL in bulk mode. No Following Feed tab for YouTube on BulkVid — re-run channel load when you need fresh uploads from a tracked channel. Free tier starts at 300 credits on email verification with +10 credits per day on first login.
The Shares column is hidden in YouTube's table layout because YouTube does not expose share counts through the API lane BulkVid uses. Duration, views, likes, and engagement rate (ER) columns are shown.
Comparison with yt-dlp and CLI tools
yt-dlp is powerful for power users who maintain cookies, rotate PO tokens, and debug extractor breakage after every YouTube frontend update. BulkVid targets teams who need a finished ZIP with consistent filenames and a CSV manifest — not a folder of templated filenames requiring post-processing. No Python install, no cookie export, no merge step for DASH fragments on the handful of videos that still serve adaptive streams.
For Shorts trend scouting, BulkVid's keyword search returns a sortable grid with engagement columns — yt-dlp requires you to already know every URL. Channel Shorts pagination replaces manually copying links from a creator's Shorts tab one by one.
Known issues you should know
Age-restricted, private, and region-blocked videos fail resolve with a per-row error — the rest of the ZIP continues. Very long live-stream replays may exceed worker timeout; split into smaller batches. Stream URL TTL expires after several hours — download soon after metadata load, or re-run dry-run if a job sat queued. Members-only and rental content is not accessible through the public API. YouTube Music audio-only tracks are out of scope — BulkVid targets video content with playable video streams.
Last verified June 2026.