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
yt-dlp can archive entire playlists and set names to be based on combinations of channel, date and URL. Probably could get an ai to give you a command that downloads a playlist in your format with your naming scheme then uses wget to get a page archive of the same name or extract said metadata from the page.
The hard part is in the scripting, the retries, the back off, automation, queuing and queue management…etc
At that point I’m implementing my own bootleg TubeArchivist 😅