I’m trying to be more mindful about my YouTube consumption, there are a lot of quality channels out there, but sticking to “subscriptions” is difficult when the YouTube app on my TV has so much distracting recommended content and shorts thrown at you, so I’d like to have a way to auto-download the content from specific channels to play later via Plex. I actually have YT Premium but plan on putting the money into the Patreons of my most-watched creators instead.
Features I’m looking for:
- Automated downloading of new videos from specific channels
- Ability to ignore/skip shorts
- SponsorBlock if possible
- Vimeo (and others) integration would be a huge plus too.
- A way to easily add videos to a download queue manually (browser extension or something) for when I come across an interesting video in the wild" by someone I’m not subscribed to/don’t want to subscribe to.
Things I’ve looked into:
- TubeSync - returns 500 errors anytime it’s indexing, which it does every day, meaning setup is very tedious. It’s also frustrating to configure for every single channel independently, but (ostensibly) does what I’m looking for? I think?
- TubeArchivist - Try as I might I just cannot get this up and running on CasaOS/Docker. Seems nice, but also looks like overkill for my use case.
- YoutubeDL-Material - Struggling to get this installed too, but it also doesn’t seem to have additional features like SponsorBlock.
Anything I’m missing or are these basically the main options for now? Would love something as simple as Sonarr.
On mobile you could also have a look at NewPipe. It does not have automated downloads but it shows you a simple list of all the videos from your subscriptions without any algorithm-based recommendations. It shows no ads and is fully open source.
Also supports plenty of services other than YouTube.
Newpipe is great at what it does, but I’m trying not to watch YT anywhere except on TV to avoid doing it mindlessly.