Using Pinchflat and Jellyfin to download and watch Youtube videos
This post is in a way an extension of my previous one about Pinchflat.
Pinchflat is a service to download Youtube videos to your local hard drive. I have been using it for quite some time now to download videos from my favourite YT channels.
There are a few reasons why I download Youtube videos. One of them being data preservation. As I wrote before, nothing on the Internet is permanent, and we should never assume that the content we enjoy will be there forever. Secondly, watching videos locally removes all the bloat, ads, comments, recommendations, it’s just a video file that you can watch however one wants. And finally, at some point in the future it will be highly possible that I will be living on limited LTE internet, and I want to hoard content locally for that hard period.
I won’t dive again into Pinchflat installation and configuration, I described it in detail in that previous post, today I want to focus on serving data downloaded with its help.
But I have a few observation after using it for months.
The first one is that Pinchflat downloads shorts by default, if you don’t want them, you need to turn it off manually in the Source settings.
Youtube sometimes gets annoyed when Pinchflat tries to download too many videos at once. If that happens, the best solution is to shutdown the container and wait a few hours. After turning it back again, the videos should continue downloading.
To stop it from happening in the first place, one solution is to download the videos in parts. Pinchflat allows to provide a cut off date for a feed, and with that it will not download videos older than that date. When I add a new channel, I set the cut off date for a few months from now, wait for those videos to download, then wait a few hours, move the cut off date further to the past, download the videos, etc, etc.
Download cut-off date in the Source settings
Now the Jellyfin part. I have Pinchflat and Jellyfin running both on my NAS. They both have access to the same ZFS pool where I store all my videos. In Jellyfin I have a separate library for my Youtube videos. In my experience the best library type for those videos is “Home Videos and Photos”. At firsts I was using “Shows”, but then Jellyfin would try to divide the videos into seasons, which does not make sense for the content that I watch.
Jellyfin does a rather good job in creating thumbnails for videos, there were only a few times where I had to provide my own to make my library look pretty.
My Youtube library in Jellyfin
Also Jellyfin and Pinchflat are a good duo, as both automatically refresh, so new videos appear in the library without any human intervention. If you watch only a limited set of channels, with the combination of Pinchflat and Jellyfin you could never need to visit the Youtube’s page at all.
Let’s hope that Youtube will not find a way to block third party software, at least in the near future. Until that, let’s fill our hard drives :)
Looks like that’s it, a super short post this time, but I wanted to share my process that I am happy with.
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