Is there something I can use to fetch and serve YouTube videos locally? - eviltoast

I am keeping my children away from Youtube, but there are plenty of educational videos that I would like to make available for them to view at their leisure. I would like something that works more or less like this:

  1. I add a youtube video url/playlist url/channel url
  2. It downloads the videos, possibly with metadata, and stores them locally.
  3. It serves them through a nice web interface.
  4. (optional) it syncs the channel content and keeps it up to date.

Is there anything similar out there?

  • killermenpl@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I don’t know if you want a pretty UI for adding the videos/playlists/channels, but yt-dlp can do all that. You’d probably have to set up some kind of cron job for it. Then you can serve it via any of the available video players (I’m pretty sure Jellyfin has a youtube metadata addon).

    • Kended@alien.topBEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yeah this would do the trick. I have a simple yt-dlp script setup that is set as a cron job. Everyday at 4:30 AM it checks a list of YouTube channels I have and downloads any new videos that channel has to a corresponding media directory that jellyfin has access to, keeping that channels content up to date.

      This lets me easily set and forget my script, so now whenever I want to watch that channels video I can just open jellyfin, which stores all my media, not just YouTube, and view it from there.

      It does eat up storage though on big channels, but if you got the space it’s not a big issue.