I'm looking to download a number of educational youtube videos for future reference. Looking for a reliable way to download videos. OS is Ubuntu. FF extensions and docker containers all good. I don't really want to install an executable on bare metal unless it is a flatpak.
My goal is for the downloaded videos to be accessed locally via jellyfin. Jellyfin is already sorted.
Thanks in advance for your recommendations!
I always use yt-dlp do download youtube videos. It doesn't require installation, you just download and run it.
I was just looking at this. Do you typically run it behind a VPN or do you expose your actual IP?
It shouldn't be needed but if you want extra privacy, you can try torsocks.
I use it all the time without any VPN and haven't had any issues. I watch almost all youtube videos in MPV, which uses yt-dlp to get the video. I download any video I may want to watch again later to my server.
I never used a VPN with it. I've been using it for years. I figured I'm getting it directly for YouTube. Google already knows my IP. I figured they wouldn't care unless I abuse it anyway.
yt-dlp, full hd quality, best audio, reading from a txt file for every URL
yt-dlp with a couple scripts I wrote, depending on the usecase.
If you're into selfhosting I've heard good things about tube archivist. It integrates with jellyfin
Seconded. It downloads metadata, thumbnails, and comments too. Also has a browser extension that adds a download button into YouTube to trigger downloads on the server.
TubeArchivist with a browser extension to easily download any interesting video I want to preserve.
I have pending to link TubeArchivist to jellyfin for a more convenient frontend for my videos.
On my phone i use tubular, which is a fork of NewPipe with sponsor block added.
Cobalt is an awesome downloader, if the main instance (cobalt.tools) ever goes down or gets blocked by YouTube, there are countless other instances: https://instances.hyper.lol/instances/
It's really a great project, make sure to promote it, give it a star on GitHub, maybe donate a few bucks (crypto addresses can be found when clicking on the donate button in the app)