ytsync

Download YouTube playlists.

Tired of Internet rot destroying your curated playlists? Download all that stuff before YouTube strikes down your favorite content with arbitrary TOS violations, DMCA takedowns, or some bullshit copyright restriction forces the channel to remove the content.

This tool allows you to scan public playlists and download content to local storage while you still can. Run repeatedly in a cron job to incrementally sync newly added content.

Pre-requisites

youtube-dl

Mac OS X:

$ brew install youtube-dl

ffmpeg

Mac OS X:

$ brew install ffmpeg

Installation

$ pip3 install .

Getting Started

To begin, you will need:

• YouTube Data API key
• Channel id or playlist id

Create a YouTube Data API Key

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started

Find the Channel Id

Browse to a channel and the id is in the URL:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel_id>

Find the Playlist Id

Browse to a playlist and the id is in the URL:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=<playlist_id>

Or, use ytsync to browse playlist ids on a channel.

Usage

$ ytsync -h

List Downloadable Playlists on a Channel

$ ytsync --api-key <key> list-playlists <channel_id>

Outputs playlist id and title.

Sync a Playlist

$ ytsync --api-key <key> sync-playlist <playlist_id>

Downloaded content will be downloaded using highest quality available and saved at file path such as: download/<playlist>/<video>.mkv.

If the content has already been downloaded, it will be skipped. Or, pass option -f to force overwrite.

Sync All Playlists on a Channel

$ ytsync --api-key <key> sync-channel <channel_id>

Run in Docker

Alternatively, ytsync can be run inside a Docker container.

$ docker build -t ytsync .
$ docker run --rm ytsync --api-key <key> list-playlists <channel_id>

Environment Variables

| API_KEY | Pass API key securely through environment. Omit --api-key option. |

Customize Video Transcoding

By default, ytsync will tell youtube-dl to download highest quality streams and merge to an "mkv" format file.

This behavior can be customized by passing option --ytdl-args "...", such as:

$ ytsync --ytdl-args "-f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mkv" ...

See youtube-dl README for details.