Playing by oldest is currently not possible

[RobertWesner]

Putting this here for reference.

Playing by oldest would require a native playlist. To my knowledge, such a playlist has never existed and will likely not ever exist.

Feel free to add to the discussion.

[RobertWesner]

There seems to be a very peculiar hidden list that has some potential: ULcxqQ59vzyTk

This list is not directly viewable on its own and seems to only work within the context of /watch. The name of this playlist is More videos from <CHANNEL_NAME>. It is not tied to the id of any channel.

This "More videos from..." playlist can play by oldest in some circumstances, though it can also be unreliable.

The numerical video index when using this playlist is bugged and - based on my tests - stays on a fixed number.

I am unsure on how it mixes videos with shorts and streams, my tests have been inconclusive.

[DatGeekUKnow]

Just so know there is definitely a demand out there for this feature.

I know I'm looking for this at least.

[RobertWesner]

Hi @DatGeekUKnow, there really is, people do request it on the occasion! But the difficulty is the lack of an official playlist.

There already is some foundational work towards playing by oldest, like the playlist emulation via my API. But the emulation needs some refinement, as it was only intended as a last resort for big playlists (> 10k videos).

Besides the rework of emulation, my API will need changes, like a ?reverse=true option.

But when I push a feature like this out, my API-key will quickly be exhausted ^^
So I either convince Google to extend it agian, or will require every user to set up their own Instance, which many are not willing to.

Another way would be using something akin to my random-play logic with a warmup to locally store all the items of a playlist and then reverse them. That should definitely be doable, but doing it efficiently is another thing. I want to avoid the end-user having to wait a few minutes per large playlist because I need to "refresh it ~50 times since YouTube only displays a slice of videos within the playlist widget" and fiddling with the APIv1 directly is... dubious at best, ToS violation at worse.