Top 100 educational videos (from a playlist or channel) need to appear in order, on a bookshelf

[deldesir]

This is a placeholder to update about incremental progress on the implementation of the "TOP 100 VIDEOS" feature.

“TOP” means 100 highest popularity/quality videos from the channel/playlist, i.e. sorted by views-per-day or the best we can do!

[holta]

Teachers and Students MUST be able to see the Playlist/Channel's (1) Original Online URL AND ALSO the (2) New URL corresponding to the "TOP ~50 VIDEOS" (in order) from their offline subset:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=ID1,ID2,ID3,ID4

This is an Important Requirement — just as was emphasized 3 weeks ago for individual videos:

• Display video/bookshelf original URL (or canonical URL if possible!) to all users [ASIDE: upload of offline video works, despite red error "Failed to Move Cover File" in web UI] #107

REASON: We need to accelerate this work and deliver the ordered, offline subsets that will immediately be useful to educators — with fully functional URLs they need in their hands on Day 1 — to be able to copy/paste and text to their fellow educators, building variations on these de facto mini-curriculums!

And the fastest way to deliver this MVP (minimum viable product) is to use Google's hack to auto-create "TOP 50 VIDEOS" playlist URLs, even if that limits everyone's auto-created playlists to a maximum of 50 videos as explained here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61891076/how-do-i-create-a-playlist-from-multiple-video-ids-on-youtube

Obviously such 50-video URLs are insanely long, and only include half of of the 100 videos delivered offline. And that is fine during early days: Solid & Practical Functionality needs to preempt Cute Cosmetics ✅

[deldesir]

This auto-created playlist hack is practical, but the title of the derived bookshelf will need to be edited/provided manually.

[holta]

Metadata Democratization STRETCH GOAL, along the lines of #107:

Educators and Students should be able to see the average length of every video in a Bookshelf, e.g. in some very clear Human-Readable form like HH:MM:SS.

Why? Educators/parents/siblings need to be able to instantly see the lay-of-the-land, knowing if videos tend to be ~30 seconds each, or ~3 minutes each, or ~3 hours each... as they proceed to map out their daily curriculum design / lesson planning — using any particular YouTube-derived bookshelve(s) appropriate for the learning topics of that week!

[holta]

Progress is appearing here:

• PR Download "top 100 videos" from YouTube channel or playlist, sorted by views-per-day #139
• PR Refactor for better maintainability #142
• PR Add Max Download limits #143
• PR Update to retrieve key metadata #144
• PR Calculate each video's views-per-day [very rough approximation for popularity / importance / quality] #145
• PR Sort videos by views-per-day + download the top ones #146