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.

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.

This looks promising! Thank you!

Yeah, this is the one. My archive is currently about 20TB.

I use Pinchflat, there's a similar one called Youtarr also.

Seconded. I self host it for family members for that reason!

I can see the appeal of downloading YouTube content opposed to streaming, however if folks are looking to stream I would suggest Invidious + Freetube.

This looks great! I'm looking into this now, to see if it's compatible with my current workflow and hardware. Thank you!

Also using this and have been for around a year now. I set it to pull thumbnails and descriptions off the videos and give it a specific folder in my main media drive so it’s easy to pick up in Plex. Worked great so far!

Worth noting too: you can set it up to monitor a playlist. I use this feature by making a public playlist and I add stuff to the playlist that I dont want to lose.

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

This is great, thank you!

But that's just the downloader, right? It doesn't monitor and autodownload based on newly added videos, does it?