YouTube

1 readers

1 users here now

c/youtube is a community for YouTube. Discuss the platform, videos, channels, creator tips, or anything that relates to YouTube! Please read and follow the rules. Have fun, be kind!

Rules:

No politics
Do not suggest that users should like or subscribe
No advertising products or services
No explicit self promotion
Be kind

Posting Guidelines:

Discussion based posts are primarily encouraged. You may post links to videos or channels but there must be a reason for doing so other than promoting videos/channels. This guideline should ensure there is less spam and less self-promotion so we can grow a rich community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Tips/ideas for automatically downloading youtube videos from specific channels? (on Linux) (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In the light of google cracking down on ad block i want to be pro-active and automatically download new videos to my jelly fin server.

I was thinking off using this tool https://youtube-dl.org/ and writing a small script for it (with help of gpt4) but i am missing any general strategy on when i should trigger it and how to make sure it downloads all of the new videos exactly once.

I am hoping that i am not the first to do this and people can give me some good tips before i put to much work into this project.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I believe there will always be a way to watch these videos ad-free. I can't imagine they will restructure the video serving infrastructure to force ads in a way that can't be blocked as there is so many devices and official YouTube clients (gaming consoles, Smart TVs, etc). However, I do think they might make it difficult.

youtube-dl is the way to go. One thing you could do is keep a text file containing video IDs that you have already downloaded and before downloading a new video and append the new video ID to the list. Another way is you could also set the file name to the video ID to and check if it exists before downloading as well.