I have a C# program I’m working on where I want to have a predefined dictionary list of playlist names (key) and a corresponding YouTube playlist link (value), which I iterate through to feed to yt-dlp.exe to generate a full list of each playlists’ video information.

I can get the process to start, but it always throws an error partway through on what seems like a URL parsing issue. I tried taking it out of the iteration loop but it’s still happening. The related code (with error logging logic) so far:

        var operatingDir = @"C:Userspath-to-dir-goes-here";
        

        var videoPlaylists = new Dictionary<string, string>();
        
        videoPlaylists["alpha"] = "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrhpb4TQr-uKzxOB1C_9x-Ysrj2WRMZN_";
        videoPlaylists["bravo"] = "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcLtbK8Nf64InyudI1rnYwwRbCr08yup_";
        videoPlaylists["charlie"] = "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS9Gv3hDYt_Uh_bI6m2S20siUfPUk1I1b";
        

        var playbackIndex = new Dictionary<string, double>();
        string ytDlpPath = operatingDir + "yt-dlp.exe";
        string ytDlpArgs = "";
        
        
            ProcessStartInfo runYtDlp = new ProcessStartInfo();        
            runYtDlp.FileName = @ytDlpPath;
            ytDlpArgs = "--skip-download --ignore-errors --flat-playlist --playlist-random --force-overwrites --print "https://www.youtube.com/embed/%(id)s?controls=0&autoplay=1&cc_load_policy=1&cc_lang_pref=en    %(title)s   %(duration)s" "" + videoPlaylists["alpha"] + "" > "" + operatingDir + "alpha" + ".txt"";
            runYtDlp.Arguments = ytDlpArgs;
            
            
            Process process = new Process();
            process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
            
            process.StartInfo = runYtDlp;
            process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
            process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true;

            process = Process.Start(runYtDlp);
           
            process.WaitForExit();
            Console.ReadKey();

yt-dlp always gets about 80 lines into writing to the file when this error hits:

ERROR: [generic] '>' is not a valid URL. Set --default-search "ytsearch" (or run  yt-dlp "ytsearch:>" ) to search YouTube
ERROR: Unable to handle request: Unsupported url scheme: "c" (requests, urllib, websockets, curl_cffi)

I don’t think it’s yt-dlp itself because when I input the arguments directly in the command line it runs fine. Am I formatting my argument string wrong or something?