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Download your favourite YouTube videos

criminallyvulgar.dev396 points186 comments
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YouTube videos can disappear when creators remove them, accounts are shut down, or platforms change their policies, so anything worth keeping should be downloaded and archived. A simple setup using yt-dlp or a wrapper and a storage drive is enough for most people. The case for saving videos becomes especially clear when someone depends on particular content: the writer relies on Many a True Nerd Let’s Plays to fall asleep and needs them available on a TV, integrated with a NAS, arranged across many playlists, and updated without manual sorting.

The writer’s more elaborate system uses Jellyfin to serve videos, yt-dl-sub to download them and preserve playlist information, and Tdarr to reduce storage demands. Jellyfin’s TV-show library model does not fit playlists neatly, so configuration choices determine whether videos appear under playlist or year-based seasons; correcting the setup can require reimporting a large library. Tdarr converts files to the more storage-efficient H.265 format, saving about 700 GB from a 2 TB collection, but its interface is difficult, complex workflows can fail, and conversion may disrupt thumbnails. This setup is presented as overkill: the central recommendation is simply to keep local copies of videos that matter, while treating elaborate media-server organization and automated re-encoding as optional solutions to specific needs.

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