I’m looking for a tool that monitors a YouTube channel, then downloads only new videos into a folder.
I found ChannelHoarder, and was wondering if anyone had any experience with it and/or if anyone had any other suggestions?
Also, sorry if this is not the right place for this question. Mods, feel free to remove if this isn’t the right place.
Check out this site for app recommendations I e personally used tube archivist , pinch flat and youtarr. I much prefer youtarr at this stage
Not that I have any say in the matter but I think this kind of question is fine for the selfhost community. It’s still in the spirit of “how to do xyz with my own hardware / less dependence on a third party”.
The other suggestions have covered my own. I did want to add that good resources for finding these kinds of tools are often called Awesome lists. Awesome self-hosted. Awesome CLI. Awesome social media. You get it. I’m not sure where the trend started but I stumbled on them after getting fed up with the likes of Slashdot and AlternativeTo.
They’re usually a community-maintained git repo on one of the major platforms. This list has quite a few hits for “YouTube”, for instance: https://github.com/krzemienski/awesome-video
This is great, thank you!
yt-dlp has an option to list everything it downloads in an archive file (so that when a video is downloaded once it isn’t downloaded again), and also has an option to download playlists. That way, it should be possible to set up the command to do what you want.
Just last week I set up https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub on my homelab because I’m sick of how enshittified the subscription page on YouTube is these days. Even fetches sonsorblock data.
Welcome to the club! It looks like the other recommended solutions have a UI for browsing as well, which is cool. As it is my ytdl-sub feeds into a library for Emby so I personally don’t need another UI, but it is tempting. Only issue I could see is the same one I had to fix: Some videos only had AV1 available, and support for AV1 encoding only begins at the very recent Intel Core Ultra and AMD 7040 CPUs. Without those even 720p playback is laggy af… I have an RTX 3060 at my disposal for HW transcoding but who knows if those YouTube archiver/players support it
Edit: Just did some research, it seems that the other services don’t have support for HW transcoding or multiple users. And they are much more resource-intensive than ytdl-sub + Emby
I have been using YouTube DL.
But that’s just the downloader, right? It doesn’t monitor and autodownload based on newly added videos, does it?
The one I’m talking about runs in Docker and will auto download from a channel or playlist based on all kinds of rules and filters you set up. I use it up scrape favourite channels automatically every other day. Downloads them into a folder monitored by Jellyfin.
Yeah, this is the one.
This looks promising! Thank you!
Best “it just works” solution I’ve found. So many others are just weird scripts around yt-dlp, and this kind of is too, but the most maintained and supported. I’m at like… well I have over 1000 pages of videos in there. It’s solid.
Can I have it download videos discriminately? For example, exclude live streams, ignore videos under 2 minutes, only download videos from 2025, only download videos uploaded on Mon-Fri? Furthermore could I have it download one playlist from a channel in 1080p, and a separate playlist from a channel in 720p?
This has been my solution. Subscribe to a playlist or an entire channel, set up the schedule, and you’re done. If you’re a supporter of the project I believe it has real-time monitoring for new uploads.
I will note that, somewhat recently, YouTube changed the URL format for playlists and this has broken subscribing/downloading playlists that use the new format. I haven’t checked today but there’s a patch that was still waiting to be merged. Unless there’s a new release incorporating it, you’ll have to apply it yourself or feed the URLs in manually for now.
I use Pinchflat and I love it. No need for YouTube and its dumb amount of ads (on tv and phone).
I use Pinchflat, there’s a similar one called Youtarr also.
Seconded. I self host it for family members for that reason!
