Goals & Background

YouTube no longer offers version 2 of their API, which included feeds for the uploads of channels to which you were subscribed. In addition, this API version also provided feeds for individual playlists, which was very useful for the case in which you were interested in watching new videos on a particular topic, but not for the channel in general. In addition, YouTube has an incentive to subtly modify the content returned in your home feed.

ytdl replaces your YouTube subscription management. You no longer manage your YouTube channel subscriptions on youtube.com, and instead manage them through this tool. In addition, you can manage playlist subscriptions directly in the same manner as channel subscriptions.

In general, ytdl enables you to download your latest subscriptions.

Dependencies

ytdl makes use of the excellent program youtube-dl to do the actual heavy lifting of downloading YouTube videos. It's launched as a subprocess, and needs to be in your path.

Installation

Simply run make && sudo make install. The Makefile takes advantage of GNU extensions; therefore, you will want to use gmake on FreeBSD. The Makefile supports DESTDIR.

Latest Subscription Download

ytdl downloads the most-recent unseen video subscription uploads to a specified directory. This is ideal for cron.

Place a file ytdl.conf in $HOME/etc. Its contents should look something like the following.

[auth]
key = AIzaSyAujM2qD38VDMpfQHXQv3XjJx-Mjzb5Xs4

The key should be an application server key, created on the Google developers console. It will be used when making calls to the YouTube Data API (v3).

Next, import your current YouTube subscriptions. First, if you don't have it, get the channel ID for your user.

ytdl id getuser <yourusername>

Then, import the subscriptions for that channel ID.

ytdl subs import <channelid>

Just the IDs of the channels to which this channel is subscribed will be imported. Now you can run the following command to fetch and download the latest subscriptions that you haven't yet seen.

ytdl cron dlsubs --save <where/to/save/the/videos>

Note that in the first run through, ytdl will not actually download anything. Instead, it will just store the most-recent video IDs in each channel. Future invocations will continue to update this "seen state", so ytdl won't download the same videos multiple times.

Documentation

ytdl has a number of commands. In fact, the commands themselves are subdivided into command groups, with commands underneath each group. All levels of invocation are well-documented with support for a --help option. Run ytdl --help to get started.

In addition, most of the classes and methods have Pydoc documentation.

Files

• /usr/local/bin/ytdl (via make install)
• $HOME/etc/ytdl.conf
• $HOME/var/db/ytdl/* (created at runtime)
• $HOME/var/log/ytdl/cron_dlsubs.log (created by cron dlsubs)

XDG Compatibility

ytdl.conf will be pulled from the XDG config home instead, if available.

If the environment variable XDG_DATA_DIR is set to $HOME/foo/bar/share, for example, then the local DB and logs will be stored in $HOME/foo/bar/var/db/... and $HOME/foo/bar/var/log/... instead of directly under the home directory.