Determine youtube-dl "completed" status without downloading?

Question

How can I determine from bash if youtube-dl still has work to do for a particular playlist WITHOUT downloading videos? For example, if youtube-dl is used to CONTINUE downloading an existing playlist (for example, a Pluralsight course, a Youtube channel, etc.), youtube-dl loads the manifest and determines one-by-one if a video has already been downloaded. I would like to use youtube-dl to determine if all of the videos have already been downloaded WITHOUT doing the actual download. The goal is to mark the Pluralsight course or Youtube channel as "complete" so I may continue with other automated processing.

Answer 1

I don't have an answer for how to check if a playlist is finished, but youtube-dl has an inbuilt archive option, used as follows:

youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt PLAYLISTLINK

It creates a blank text file with ids of already downloaded videos and therefore won't attempt to redownload previous videos. Perhaps you could do something with this after the download, like doing a check for change in file size before and after the download. However, from what I can see that is all that they provide that could be helpful in regards to your question.