ytsync

Automated download of YouTube videos and playlists.

Tired of Internet rot destroying your curated playlists? Download all that stuff before YouTube strikes down your favorite content with arbitrary TOS violations, DMCA takedowns, or some bullshit copyright restriction forces the channel to remove the content.

This tool allows you to scan public playlists and download content to local storage while you still can. Run repeatedly in a cron job to incrementally sync newly added content.

Pre-requisites

yt-dlp

MacOS:

$ brew install pipx
$ pipx install yt-dlp

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt install pipx
$ pipx install yt-dlp

ffmpeg

MacOS:

$ brew install ffmpeg

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt install ffmpeg

Getting Started

Build input list

Create file ytsync_input. Each line contains a URL to a YouTube video, channel, or playlist. Additionally, the URL could go to any other video site that yt-dlp supports.

Lines can be empty or commented out with # character. I recommend placing a comment line before each link as a description.

Customize Video Metadata and Transcoding

Inspect ytsync.sh for customizations to YTDL_OPTS. This values is passed as parameters to yt-dlp.

The default settings in YTDL_OPTS is optimized for easy file organization across multiple channels, playlists, and individual videos, all useful metadata, and optimum audio/video quality.

Read more about yt-dlp: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Other Scripts

get.sh

Ad hoc download video URL to a playlist directory.

Usage: ./get.sh <playlist_name> <URL>

convert_thumbnails.sh

Special script to convert videos downloaded with webp format thumbnail files. Because Plex Media Server does not support webp, this script converts those to jpg.

YTDL_OPTS is set to download thumbnails as jpg or png, but if they are downloaded as webp due to a misconfiguration then this script can correct those.