Download your favourite YouTube videos

superkuh

Every time you watch a youtube video you are downloading the youtube video to disk. It is just to prevent the lawyers from exploding that we all pretend that deleting it afterword means it never was downloaded. But yes, everyone should be not deleting the videos they've downloaded.

ryankrage77

Rather than using Tdarr, wouldn't it be simpler to use yt-dlp's `--recode-video` option?

prologic

One of the things I wish I could solve better, was a way to search for and show decent search results that you could then pipe into `yt-dlp`. Every method of doing this I've seen is basically a "hack" and often breaks or doesn't work at all. Anyone have a better solution to this that lets you basically build a frontend/proxy to Youtube or lets you Search, Show results and Download what you want to see lateR?

dSebastien

I've always downloaded entire YT channels I enjoyed. I now have free/forever access to tons of content that now sits behind paywalls on topics I care about. All automated for years

tombert

I regret not archiving all the videos from the youtuber Myles Power (pseudoscience-debunker). He was one of my more favorite YouTubers but a few years ago he nuked his entire channel and all the videos on it (I suspect because his employer didn't like him arguing with people on the internet). I wanted to rewatch some of his videos recently and as far as I can tell most of his videos are now lost media. I should have downloaded them when I had the chance.

chmod775

Most of my YouTube playlists say something like "15 unavailable videos are hidden", or about ~10% for a 5 years old playlist. The same ratio holds true for most bookmarks of YouTube videos I have. There's videos from ~15 years ago that I consider gone for good - lost to the great copyright apocalypse - having been unable to find them anywhere on the today's internet.

weinzierl

Downloading your favourite stuff is absolutely what you should do, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem. Many from my generation, who grew up during an era of information scarcity, have huge stashes of hoarded data. But what can we do with it? There is no way to legally share it, so we take it with us in our graves. EDIT: Many good comments, but they all suffer from one blind spot, so I answer here instead of individually. A lot of content is only legal because it is on YouTube (or any other platform that has deals with the content industry). Sure, we can share illegally in a way that is obscure enough that no one gets sued. But what help is that, eventually it will get either popular and sued out of existence or forgotten and fade. Then there is old content that is not legally shareable at all, like old game ROMs. Plenty of millennial stuff there but the Gen-X world is already half forgotten. Cooyright is just too long and too unreliable. What we need at least is exemptions from Copyright for archivists, otherwise a lot of stuff will simply be lost in the coming decades.

shevy-java

I did so with regards from Tales from the crypt; the early seasons were great, so I have them locally. Or, at the least the better ones; some are not so good. For this purpose I also kept list, in .yml files, for the most recent URL. Not just on youtube but also dailymotion etc... Interestingly there are some surges of URLs suddenly being eliminated. Naturally we know the copyright mafia is trying to hinder us, the people here, but it is interesting how that works. Because ... it sometimes works. And then it does not work. Which is quite strange to me. For instance, you can often still find new videos on youtube here, even full movies. Sometimes you can download them; then suddenly they are gone, but they were up before that for months or even years. So it is really really strange to see some videos suddenly vanishing, others being around for decades literally. Even when you'd assume these have ... "copyright issues".

vagab0nd

I have a nightly job that looks at all my youtube playlists, and downloads them to disk. It also sends me an email whenever a video that I haven't watched becomes unavailable so I can watch the local version. It took about 2 days to setup, but probably 30 minutes with AI today.

mococa

I've been (manually) download my favourite youtube videos to my cloud since I've noticed some videos gone forever for any reasons.

allexsendev

Read the comments and combined with my personal experience, made me wanna have a full on offline library, and in a better case, "decentralized" libraries of such things, although at the very least videos prolly won't work all that well.

EvanAnderson

I agree with the sentiment (and have several TB of archived Youtube videos) but I can't help but think "Keep this on the down-low!". I feel the same way every time someone mentions Youtube RSS feeds (which drive my archiving rig). Keep quiet or they'll take them away!

jerjerjer

> ytdl-sub > This is the only yt-dlp wrapper that allowed me to properly maintain the Playlist structure to any extent I have the same requirement and it's possible to do it with the default yt-dlp: yt-dlp --embed-metadata --parse-metadata "playlist_index:%(track_number)s" "PLAYLIST_URL"

hsuduebc2

>The corporate internet is hostile to art and the things you love Agreed. I mourn the deletion of legendary Hair cake video from FilthyFrank every now and then. But at least we have AI slop videos or in better case videos with "The inevitable rise and fall of XXX" title" with human narrator reading AI written script. But hey at least everyone censor word f ck and sh t.

Teslazar

I'm using the External Application Button browser extension along with yt-dlp so that I can download YT videos with a single click. https://webextension.org/listing/external-application-button... My arguments line for the extension looks something like this: /C C:\Users\[user]\youtube-dl\yt-dlp.exe -v -P "D:\Media\Videos" -f "bv*[vcodec!*=av01]+ba/b" --write-subs --embed-subs --sub-langs "en.\*" --compat-options no-keep-subs --merge-output-format mkv [HREF]

mulemisterX

The other year I came to the same conclusion so I built a web frontend for yt-dlp with queue support. I have 'profiles' that I can pick from at the time of download that allow custom yt-dlp configs to be active at any given time, which routes videos to different locations and jellyfin being one of those locations.

zabriel_goss

In addition to what's included in the post, I'll recommend Tube Archivist as a self-hosted solution. Utilizes yt-dlp, you can configure download speeds to avoid getting temporarily blocked, handles subscriptions and playlists. I've been enjoying it!

sampo

Around 2018, someone had done a lot of work and there were videos like "The Adventures of Tyrion the Imp (Season 1)" in Youtube. They had taken all Tyrion's storyline scenes from all the episodes, and put them together in one video. And they had done these for all of the Game of Thrones main characters, so there were lots of these videos. At some point, all those videos were removed.

tchoedak90

Lol would love to sue this to download some of the movies on youtube

lylarius1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jktuzvxRSNE