When you copy the URL for sharing in YouTube, it adds a query parameter now, so=blah, for tracking the source. This removes that. It could of course be smarter and stop at either the end or the next parameter, but since I haven’t seen any extras, I just remove everything after.
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This is great, thanks! I was about to build one of these. Now I’ll have to make a more complex one :-)
Ideas for my more complex version:
- Handle original and shorts URLs
- Return cleaned original URL & Piped.video URL
- Bonus: handle multiple URLs simultaneously
Use case:
Someone posts a YouTube URL and a YouTube shorts URL in a Lemmy comment, both with the tracking parameter. I copy the comment to clipboard and run the shortcut. My clipboard is populated with a clean YouTube URL, the second clean YouTube URL (instead of the initial shorts syntax), and a piped.video mirror of each link. It may prepend a comment like “Hey, Google snuck some trackers onto your links, so I used a little script on my phone to remove them for us:”
Tap to see the instructions a language model couldn’t follow when I tried the other day :)
Create an iOS shortcut that performs the following actions:
- Takes a URL, such as
example URL 1orexample URL 2. - Removes the identifier at the end, as seen in
Example identifier one. - Returns
Example output URL 1andExample output URL 2.
Example URL 1:
https://youtube.com/shorts/hJClg5QBBcA?si=ULI0ulElvw2Z1ooeExample URL 2:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hJClg5QBBcA?si=ULI0ulElvw2Z1ooeExample identifier 1:
?si=ULI0ulElvw2Z1ooeExample output URL 1:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hJClg5QBBcAExample output URL 2:
https://piped.video/watch?v=hJClg5QBBcAAt the end of the day, the shortcut must be able to automatically identify and subsequently handle either one regular YouTube URL or one YouTube shorts URL at a time. It must be able to strip the unique identifier found at the end of the provided URL. It must return a regular YouTube URL and a Piped mirror.
Or, you could just remove the “si” parameter from the link manually…
Yes, there are many things one could do manually that could otherwise be done with automation, but here we are… in an automation community.