I’ve been using Tube Archivist to archive my YouTube playlists, but I’ve hit a portability snag. It stores all metadata in its internal database and saves video files with non-readable filenames. This makes the archive unreadable without the software and its database, which defeats the point of long-term archival storage.
Are there any tools that:
- Archive playlists with human-readable filenames (or let you control the naming scheme)
- Have an API for queuing archival jobs
- Store metadata in portable formats (e.g., sidecar JSON or YAML)
- Don’t require additional software to interpret the archive
I settled on Tubesync. Pinchflat mysteriously stopped downloading new vids from a playlist I had it monitor. Surely I could have fixed it by checking logs or whatever but Tubesync has the exact same feature list and no downsides, so I just killed my pinchflat container and spun up tubesync.
I changed over to PinchFlat instead for Tube Archivist for these reasons. It’s even easier to setup than TA. I have mine hooked up to store the files on an SMB share that JellyFin can read.
https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflatSure it’s not a proprietary binary DB, right? Probably just sqlite or something? Bet you can just dump it.
But yeah, switch to something without those problems. There’s lots of them out there.
Oh it’s definitely an easy to read DB. But that’s still beyond the point IMHO.
If you can’t reconstruct the state of your files without 3rd party software to interpret them, then they are not in an archive format.
One should be able to browse their data using OS native tools on an offline device push comes to shove.
i just use yt-dlp with a config that stores all metadata. seems to work fine… but its kinda hassle to find what you need among all downloaded stuff
