giof71/yt-helper repository overview

⁠yt-helper

Welcome to yt-helper, a simple YouTube helper tool for downloading from playlists and channels.
The main purpose is make the videos I want to watch available to network shares, media servers, etc, as seamlessly as possible.

⁠Links

⁠References

This project relies on the following projects:

⁠Description

This is a simple video downloader, it will rely on pytube and yt-dlp (see References⁠ for details).
By defaults, it will monitor the provided playlists and try to download new videos every 300 seconds.
Already downloaded videos will not be downloaded again.

⁠Installation

The preferred way to install the application is via docker. See the Examples⁠ section.
Of course, you can start the python application yt-helper.py directly, and/or create a systemd service if you prefer to do so.

⁠Configuration

At the current stage of development, the configuration is done using environment variables and volumes using Docker.

⁠Environment Variables

Channels do not currently work (at least before the latest pytube update, which I have not tried yet), because the application always gets an empty list when trying to retrieve the list of video urls.

⁠Playlist format

A playlist can be provided as is (just the id), or along with a colon followed by a date (YYYY-mm-dd format) which will be used as the lower limit for the upload date of the videos.
Example:

PLAYLIST_LIST=PL12345,PL23456

or

PLAYLIST_LIST=PL12345:2023-08-01,PL23456

When a date is specified, only videos published after, and including, the specified date (August 1st 2023 in the example) will be processed for the playlist with id PL12345.
Alternatively, we can use a list of dictionaries, using the separator ";" between playlist property pairs and the separator "=" as the assignment operator. The previous example would become:

PLAYLIST_LIST=id=PL12345;subscription_start=2023-08-01,id=PL23456

This adds the flexibility to specify different properties for each playlist, for future use.

⁠Playlist field keys:

⁠Channel name format

The considerations made for Playlist Format⁠ apply, just replace the playlist id with the channel name.

⁠Channel by name field keys:

⁠Volumes

⁠Examples

Here is a simple docker compose file. The commented variables are optional.
You will need to replace PLxx1, PLxx2, PLxx3 as well as the channel name(s) with your playlists and/or channel names.

---
version: '3'

services:
  yt-helper:
    container_name: yt-helper
    image: giof71/yt-helper:latest
    volumes:
      - ./db:/db
      - ./downloads:/downloads
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Rome
      #- PUID=1000
      #- PGID=1000
      #- LOOP_WAIT_SEC=300
      #- FILE_NAME_TEMPLATE=%(uploader)s - %(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s
      #- DIRECTORY_PER_CHANNEL=0
      - PLAYLIST_LIST=PLxx1,PLxx2,PLxx3
      - CHANNEL_NAME_LIST=ANiceChannel:2023-07-27
    restart: unless-stopped