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.

  • code@lemmy.zipEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • kamills@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Wonderful. I’m gonna have a look at that, I’ve been hoping to find something that works with sponsorblock

    • Corgana@startrek.websiteOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • code@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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)

  • Pete90@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Tubearchivist works great for me. Downloader, database and player, all in one. Even integration with jellyfin is possible, not sure about plex though.

    • Corgana@startrek.websiteOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • lue3099@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • rbn@feddit.chEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachtsEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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

  • deleted@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    https://github.com/Tzahi12345/YoutubeDL-Material

    It does support sponsorblock. You need to add a tag within the command and it’ll apply it to all new videos.

    Also, if you use docker, I can help you with the installation.

    1. Download this file: https://github.com/Tzahi12345/YoutubeDL-Material/blob/master/docker-compose.yml

    2. Go to terminal and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the file.

    3. Copy this code and hit enter: docker-compose pull

    4. Copy this code and hit enter: docker-compose up

    5. Wait for 15 minutes and in the container log

    If successful, it should say “HTTP(S): Started on port 17443” or something similar. This tells you the container-internal port of the application.

    Try both ports and see if it works 8998, 17442