MeTube: Self-Hosted YouTube Downloader

Consider also Tube Archivist. If you just want to download a few videos it's overkill, but I use it to archive and index technical channels I like. It can do advanced full text and metadata searches on the transcription/subtitles as well as comments (and title and description). Much better than what alphabet provides, annoyingly.

https://www.tubearchivist.com/

What I’d really like is a YouTube TiVo.

There are about 100 channels that I watch religiously, but, release infrequently. I never want to miss a video from these channels.

I also don’t want to open YouTube and sift through hundreds of releases from channels that release four times/day just to find the 1-2 videos that I actually want to watch (and will inevitably miss.)

Just give me a priority feed of the stuff I actually want/need to watch. If I can download everything and watch it over DLNA, even better,

Making sure we don’t miss the things we love isn’t YouTube’s M.O. Keeping the feedbag strapped to our faces while we watch someone stretch a 3 minute video into a 18-22 minute one, is.

I don't understand one thing...why do you need to host it on a server? It can be just a standalone app on windows/Linux/mac. I recently just started using yt-dlp and have thought of making a simple app. Should I though? Are there any alternatives in existence of this kind?

Would be nice if there was an interface into Jellyfin so that you could search Youtube, have yt-dlp download, and then stream through Jellyfin without ads.

Pretty cool! I currently use https://cobalt.tools, it's nice as well.

I discovered that brave for iOS has a playlist button which downloads YouTube videos and stores them on your device, allowing PiP and offline playback without ads. I wonder why more apps don't do this as they have an open license based off a Mozilla iOS backend. They found a way to get Apple to accept it and their CEO has even posted HERE about it defending their technique as valid. Essentially, it triggers only after loading the video inside the regular YouTube website, like a reader button that works across any video content (not just YouTube).

It's a bit puzzling to me, how many YouTube mirroring tools are available out there. If you're using something like that, what's your reason to download/archive the videos instead of just streaming them from YouTube?

I get that sometimes it's great to archive a video in the case it get's deleted from YouTube, but in my case this very rarely happens. I watch the video and I'm done with it. If I can't re-watch it, this doesn't really matter to me.

Related:

Yark: YouTube Archiver with Offline UI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41100820

I think that one of these yt-dlp based servers wrapped in a dead simple PiHole-like imager and some nice front end client apps for playback could really take off in the same way PiHole did with less technical users.

Buy a Raspberry Pi, image the microSD card, select your favorite YT channels, install client apps… all your favorite YT content now available locally and ad free!

I currently use TubeSync. Despite its simple functionality and many bugs it has, it works well enough for me.

My only task: subscribe to a channel or playlist, download videos to a path and check once a day for new stuff.

The only UX I need is for setting up the channels. Then just save the files and let Plex take it from there.

Anyone knows of a better option?

I wouldn't mind a single program like this that let's you download from all sources: youtube, reddit, ig, twitter, facebook, etc.

I use this to download videos I add to my playlists into our shared Plex server.

Mostly concert videos and skate parts. We have an archive.

I made one similar thing to download music. It kind of worked but I end up giving Spotify a chance.

Why self hosted when you can use something like freetube? So you can access through mobile? I only tend to watch videos one time so this seems like overkill unless you use youtube A LOT and regularly for the same streams.

Does there exist a “light weight” YouTube self hosted clone.

Something like plex for YouTube?

I want to auto download videos from my favourite podcasts, but then have a super simple dashboard that shows the videos and lets me watch them.

MeTube works really well. There are browser plugins for it too. I supports not only YT, but x.com and (a-hem) other sites too

I have an ios shortcut I use to "share" a url to metube for background download.

This is awesome! I’ve been putting off building the same thing myself.

See also yt-dlp-web-ui: https://github.com/marcopeocchi/yt-dlp-web-ui

Not AGPL, support for custom profiles, better UX (IMO)

really great tool. can it also download the videos that are in members only?

"Self-hosted" ... on something that very much used to be a fairly simple desktop app... JDownloader anyone? Or yt-dlp ????

It was pretty straightforward for me to install and use yt-dlp. On a Mac with Homebrew you can do `brew install yt-dlp` to install it in one command. IIRC yt-dlp also provides binaries you can install directly. I'm not sure if installing docker and running a web server is any way easier than that.

However, there are ways to download Youtube videos without installing a native app. For example, it is possible to use a library like Youtube.js [0] to make a browser extension that downloads Youtube videos directly. You won't find those on Google's web store due to policy, but you can find a handful on Github.

0: https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js