Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Cookie-based YouTube/YouTube Music providers show playlists but their contents are empty

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#595 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
63/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
go
Domain
backend, cli

Research direction

Start by tracing playlist item retrieval for the cookie-based YouTube and YouTube Music providers, using the reported yt-dlp commands as a comparison for the same browser session. Check how the providers handle playlists such as Watch Later, Liked Videos, and Liked Music, then run the relevant provider tests or reproduce with the supplied Cliamp commands. Done means opening detected playlists displays their items.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug

Greetings;
With Cliamp v2.3.0, the cookie-based YouTube/YouTube Music providers detect some of my account playlists, but opening them shows no items.
I am using:
Windows 11, Cliamp v2.3.0, Brave browser, YouTube/YouTube Music account authenticated in Brave, cookies_from = "brave",
No client_id or client_secret configured
Steps to reproduce
1.
Log into YouTube and YouTube Music in Brave.
2.
Configure Cliamp with:
[ytmusic]
cookies_from = "brave"
3.
Start Cliamp with:
cliamp --provider ytmusic
4.
The provider shows playlists such as:
•
Watch Later
5.
However, opening these playlists shows no items.
6.
Refreshing the provider does not populate the playlist contents.
The same behavior occurs with:
cliamp --provider youtube
and:
cliamp --provider yt
In those providers, Liked Videos, Watch Later, and Sounds are displayed, but their contents are empty.
Important comparison
I tested the exact same Brave browser session directly with yt-dlp.
The following successfully retrieves playlist contents:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser brave --flat-playlist "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=LL"
and:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser brave --flat-playlist "https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=LM"
The LL playlist completes successfully as Liked Videos, and the LM playlist completes successfully as Liked Music.
Therefore, the Brave cookies and the authenticated YouTube/YouTube Music session appear to be working correctly outside Cliamp.
Expected behavior
When Cliamp detects these account playlists through the cookie-based provider, opening a playlist should display its videos/tracks just as yt-dlp can retrieve them using the same browser session.
Actual behavior
The playlist names are displayed, but the playlists contain no items.
Additional information
I initially tried the OAuth login flow, but Google returned:
403 access_denied
with the requested scope:
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.readonly
I therefore switched to the documented browser-cookie method.
The issue appears to be specific to playlist item retrieval in Cliamp's cookie-based provider rather than authentication itself.
If useful, I can provide additional debug output or test a proposed fix.
Regards.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
4.4k
Forks
307
Avg merge
2d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
63

Getting set up

  • No Dockerfile or Docker Compose file
  • Has a pull request template
  • No contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from bjarneo/cliamp

All issues in bjarneo/cliamp

Similar issues

More Go issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.