I’m trying to be more mindful about my YouTube consumption, there are a lot of quality channels out there, but sticking to “subscriptions” is difficult when the YouTube app on my TV has so much distracting recommended content and shorts thrown at you, so I’d like to have a way to auto-download the content from specific channels to play later via Plex. I actually have YT Premium but plan on putting the money into the Patreons of my most-watched creators instead.
Features I’m looking for:
- Automated downloading of new videos from specific channels
- Ability to ignore/skip shorts
- SponsorBlock if possible
- Vimeo (and others) integration would be a huge plus too.
- A way to easily add videos to a download queue manually (browser extension or something) for when I come across an interesting video in the wild" by someone I’m not subscribed to/don’t want to subscribe to.
Things I’ve looked into:
- TubeSync - returns 500 errors anytime it’s indexing, which it does every day, meaning setup is very tedious. It’s also frustrating to configure for every single channel independently, but (ostensibly) does what I’m looking for? I think?
- TubeArchivist - Try as I might I just cannot get this up and running on CasaOS/Docker. Seems nice, but also looks like overkill for my use case.
- YoutubeDL-Material - Struggling to get this installed too, but it also doesn’t seem to have additional features like SponsorBlock.
Anything I’m missing or are these basically the main options for now? Would love something as simple as Sonarr.
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Ytdl-sub is what you want. Does allmost all of that. Has sets up nfo and plex. Really great app. Takes a bit to config but the dev is ver responsive and is on discord all the time.
This looks good thanks, not sure how I missed it! I wish there was a GUI for configuring, but other than that it looks great.
There are people working on the gui. But honestly once it clicks its easy street. I highly suggest the discord. A ton of people running it for a while and very helpful. Say hi to codeslave there. (Me)
On mobile you could also have a look at NewPipe. It does not have automated downloads but it shows you a simple list of all the videos from your subscriptions without any algorithm-based recommendations. It shows no ads and is fully open source.
Also supports plenty of services other than YouTube.
yt-dlp can take care of the downloading part. Just have a script that checks a list of channels for new content and make a cron job for it
Tubearchivist works great for me. Downloader, database and player, all in one. Even integration with jellyfin is possible, not sure about plex though.
I’ve tried installing it via docker a hundred times and can never get it working. Maybe I’ll revisit it some day, but it also seems like more than I need and the server it’s running on isn’t super powerful.
Yeh Tubearchivist is a beast. A python Django app, Elasticsearch and Redis. It uses like 1-2 GB of ram for me. And although it works and has no issues for me as I’m quite good with docker and coupling apps together, it’s always scary upgrading it. Broken redis-server many times, but seems to recover after deleting it and setting the settings again.
