About this site

YouTube Playlist Analyser is a free tool that measures how long a YouTube playlist is and turns that total into a day-by-day study schedule. This page explains who runs it, how it works, and what it won't do.

Last reviewed: 6 October 2026

Why it exists

It started with a specific annoyance: deciding whether to commit to a long programming course on YouTube without any idea whether it represented ten hours or ninety. YouTube shows you a video count and individual durations, never a total. For a short playlist you can add it up; for a 200-video lecture series the number you most need is the one you can't get.

Several tools already returned a total. None of them answered the question that actually mattered, which wasn't "how long is this?" but "when would I finish it?" A 60-hour playlist means nothing without knowing it's 60 hours at an hour a day — and that watching at 1.5x turns it into something closer to six weeks than three months. So the planner became the point of the tool, and the duration total became the input to it.

Who runs it

It's built and maintained by Rahul Anand, a software developer. It's a personal project, not a company — there's no team, no funding, and no investors to answer to. That's worth knowing in both directions: nobody is monetising your attention beyond ads on the content pages, and equally there's no support desk, just one person reading the inbox.

Corrections, bug reports and feature suggestions all go to rahulanand1196@gmail.com. The Contact page lists what's most useful to include.

How it works

Durations come from the official YouTube Data API v3 rather than from scraping the playlist page. The flow is:

  1. Extract the playlist ID. A full URL, a link copied from a video page with &list= in it, or a bare PL… ID all work.
  2. Page through the playlist. The API returns contents 50 at a time, in playlist order, so long playlists are fetched completely rather than truncated at the first page.
  3. Fetch durations in batches. Video IDs go out 50 per request and come back with exact durations, which are parsed from ISO 8601 into seconds. Deleted and private entries have no duration and are skipped.
  4. Build the plans locally. Everything after this point — daily capacity, packing videos into days, comparing speeds — is arithmetic on the server. No further requests to YouTube are involved.

Results are cached for 24 hours per playlist. This is partly speed and partly necessity: the YouTube API has a daily quota, and caching means adjusting your daily minutes or speeds costs nothing extra, because only the first lookup of a playlist touches YouTube at all.

What it doesn't do

Being clear about the limits saves everyone time:

  • No private playlists. Only the owner can read those, and this site never asks you to sign in to a Google account.
  • No downloading. It reads duration metadata. It does not download, rip, re-host or mirror videos.
  • No accounts. There is nothing to register for, and no progress saved server-side between visits.
  • No channel-wide analysis. It works on playlists, not on an entire channel's uploads.
  • No guarantee on unusual durations. Live streams report their full broadcast length including dead air, and unaired premieres have no real duration yet.

Independence and funding

The site isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to YouTube or Google. It uses YouTube's public API as any third-party developer may.

Running costs are a server and a domain. The intention is to cover them with advertising on the written pages, which is why those exist as real articles rather than as thin wrappers around a form. If ads are running, you'll be asked for cookie consent before any advertising cookie is set; decline and the ad scripts are never loaded at all. The tool itself stays free and unrestricted either way.

Change history

Kept here so you can see what's actually been maintained rather than taking "regularly updated" on faith.

  • October 2026 — Consolidated the written guidance onto a single in-depth homepage covering duration sourcing, speed maths and scheduling, replacing three thinner standalone pages. Added about, contact and terms pages.
  • September 2026 — 24-hour per-playlist caching, so adjusting planner settings no longer re-queries YouTube. Cumulative progress chart on the plan page.
  • Mid 2026 — Expanded homepage guidance. Cookie consent gate added ahead of any advertising. Security headers and a content security policy.
  • Early 2026 — First public version: playlist duration totals, multi-speed comparison, and the day-by-day planner with whole-video and split packing.

That's the tour — try it

A playlist link or a raw PL… ID both work. Free, no sign-up.