3w ago

TubeArchivist alternatives that store data in an archive friendly manner?

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

11 comments

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/pinchflat
- Were you able to migrate your existing tubearchivist videos and metadata? I would love to switch to pinchflat, but it wouldn't be feasible for me to redownload my entire library
  
  No I had to start from scratch sort of. PinchFlat lets you choose a start date for downloading newer videos.
  I decided to age out of my old TA library and keep the ones I wanted. Not perfect but it was an okay trade off to get away from TA’s naming system
https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
Sure 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
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 😅

11 comments