Helo dear selfhosters, after more than a decade of partnerships and premium account I decided to free up my pocket about YouTube premium account (and also removed any partnership I had with evil nerds out there).
Now the question:
I would like to download and watch my favs and I can selfhost but I’m wonder which is the flawlessly solution to implement.
- Jellyfin + some tube plugin
- Tubearchivist + some client
- youtubedl + cron and emby
- others I’m ignoring…
Can you point me in the good direction?
I have good experience as selfhoster and also in pro enterprise stuff then I can do everything needed to achieve the mission.
Any recommendation is more than welcome.
Needed features:
- sync without rush some favs channels
- sync all my channels (then i’ll close them… i managed 10 channels with 20K videos)
- possibly watch remotely not just at home (i can proxy via vps and vpn if needed)
- download and watch remotely offline via IOS
All suggestions will win a beer in Genoa, Milan or Rome anytime, also remotely triggered 🍻
Base server will be a selfhosted Dell R630 with attached storage no problems computing and storage stuff. Max users predicted: 2.
Thank You 🙏
I’m using the Jeeaaasus/youtube-dl docker image, which is basically a cron to yt-dlp.
I’m downloading channels and playlists in a directory structure, with a proper naming (like every video is named with
S[YY]E[MMDD], so a video released today will be episode 1129 of season 23), that’s usable by Plex so I can access it both locally and remotely. I’m pretty sure emby or jellyfin could do the same on this front.I also added little scripts to update poster images so the channels appear nicely in my plex interface.
The youtube-dl channels configuration is through a text file that’s not really easy to access, but I don’t change it very often. I’d like to have a nice interface (the docker image provides one but it’s a simple text editor and it’s easier to open it in the terminal), but once the list of subscriptions, channels and playlists are set, I don’t change it that often.
That’s my setup, I know it’s not fit for everybody, but it suits me well. Feel free to ask me the config and script files in detail if you’re interested.
To watch stuff without ads and tracking, but still streaming, you can use clipious or newpipe on Android and android tv. If you want to replace the entire YouTube GUI with an ad free selfhosted one, check out
I’ve been using grayjay by futo the organization that rossman runs and it’s been great for youtube. It also lets you use other services all in the same app but I don’t use any of those just youtube.
Never heard of it, sounds good. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for me, since I am not interested in “Creators” but Content. But I guess a lot of people are curating their media by personality and not content subject.
Question- with these type of solutions are you just discovering new content by returning to YouTube?
I use newpipe or libretube (doesnt always work good) on android, and freetube on pc. These work very well for me.
ty for this additional suggestion!!
I started years ago with emby and youtube-dl crons but i’m happy to test all recently updated alternatives to find the one which fit best for my needs.
im using yt-dlp with crontab and archive i.e. (execerpt from script):
mkdir -p /share/_ANIME/_ANIME/Z_Download/Downloaded/yt_channels/DUST/ && cd /share/_ANIME/_ANIME/Z_Download/Downloaded/yt_channels/DUST/ && yt-dlp -N 4 --write-auto-sub --sub-lang "en,pl" --embed-metadata -i --restrict-filenames --add-metadata --embed-thumbnail --embed-subs --download-archive /exploit/logs/youtube_channels/DUST.log "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T08deT2tnf0&list=PL2X2odndvaIe-Fd-XVtE4LuRrwi0W1E_s&pp=iAQB"If you haven’t already, check out https://invidious.io/
It looks promising!!! I’ll do that tonite ty sir