How to archive YouTube
Nothing on the Internet can be considered permanent. Webpages disappear, songs get removed from Spotify[1], Amazon famously removed George Orwell’s books from Kindles[2]. Youtube videos also disappear either by copyright complains, of because their creators decide to remove them.
So what to do? Download anything you find important. In my homelab series[3] I already mentioned Metube[4], which allows downloading single videos or playlists. But now there’s something else to download videos from Youtube.
A few days ago Patryk[5] showed me Pinchflat[6]. Pinchflat is a “YouTube media manager”. It allows for downloading whole channels or playlists, and what is more, it also keeps tracks of them, and automatically downloads new videos.
There’s quite a few configuration options. You can set things like the desired video quality of downloads, add thresholds to the age of videos to be downloaded from a given channel, or how often should Pinchflat looks for new content. Everything is described in the GitHub repo.
Pinchflat can be installed using Docker, so very basic familiarity with that tool is required. After installation, it can be accessed through the browser. I also put it behind a reverse proxy with a custom subdomain for easier access. I wrote how to do it in my blog post about Caddy[7]
If you are going to install Pinchflat, make sure you have a lot of disk space in advance. I downloaded only a few channels in 1080p, and already 450GB of disk space is being used. But that’s one of the reasons we have NASes, isn’t it?
Pinchflat also allows browsing and watching videos, and provides useful metadata for the file. The metadata is stored on the disk together with the video files.
Pinchflat vs Metube
Am I going to ditch Metube after installing Pinchflat? No. I would say those two tools complement each other, and I will continue using both of them.
- Pinchflat allows downloading whole channels and playlists, and keeping track of new videos, while Metube allows downloading single videos and playlists.
- Pinchflat only supports downloading in a video format, Metube also supports downloading videos as mp3, something very useful when fetching music from YT.
And thanks it, short and sweet. Thanks for reading!
P.S. As you can see, in this post I am experimenting with footnotes. Do you prefer inline links or footnotes? Let me know on Mastodon or via email.
[2] Amazon settles 1984 suit, sets limits on Kindle deletions
[3] My Homelab
[4] Metube on Github
[5] pgronkievitz @ wspanialy.eu
[7] How to set up subdomains in the homelab with PiHole and Caddy
If you enjoyed this post, please consider helping me make new projects by supporting me on the following crowdfunding sites:
