automated-youtube-dl

Automated YouTube Archival.

A wrapper for youtube-dl that is for keeping very large amounts of data from YouTube in sync. It's designed to be simple and easy to use.

I have a single, very large playlist that I add any videos I like to. On my NAS is a service uses this program to download new videos (see [Example systemd Service.md]).

Features

• Uses yt-dlp instead of youtube-dl.
• Skip videos that are already downloaded which makes checking a playlist for new videos quick because youtube-dl doesn't have to fetch the entire playlist.
• Automatically update yt-dlp on launch.
• Downloads the videos in a format suitable for archiving:
  • Complex format that balances video quality and file size.
  • Embedding of metadata: chapters, thumbnail, english subtitles (automatic too), and YouTube metadata.
• Logs progress to a file.
• Simple display using tqdm.
• Limit the size of the downloaded videos.
• Parallel downloads.

Installation

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg atomicparsley
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

./downloader.py <URL to download or path of a file containing the URLs of the videos to download> <output directory>

Folder Structure

Output Directory/
├─ logs/
│  ├─ youtube_dl-<UNIX timestamp>.log
│  ├─ youtube_dl-errors-<UNIX timestamp>.log
├─ download-archive.txt
├─ Example Video.mkv

download-archive.txt contains the videos that have already been downloaded. You can import videos you've already downloaded by adding their ID to this file.

Videos will be saved using this name format:

%(title)s --- %(uploader)s --- %(uploader_id)s --- %(id)s

Arguments

Argument	Flag	Help
--no-update	-n	Don't update yt-dlp at launch.
--max-size		Max allowed size of a video in MB. Default: 1100.
--rm-cache	-r	Delete the yt-dlp cache on start.
--backwards	-b	Reverse all playlists and download in backwards order.
--threads		How many download processes to use (threads). Default is how many CPU cores you have. You will want to find a good value that doesn't overload your connection.
--daemon	-d	Run in daemon mode. Disables progress bars and prints output that's good for journalctl.