This is cool! Thanks a lot.

Absolutely, there are a few solutions that can help you automate YouTube channel subscriptions and downloads without reinventing the wheel!

1. yt-dlp + yt-dlp-scripts:
yt-dlp is a modern fork of youtube-dl with more features and better maintenance. You can set up a simple cron job or scheduled task to check your subscribed channels’ RSS feeds and download new videos automatically. There are plenty of scripts and guides out there for this workflow.

2. Tube Archivist:
This is a self-hosted YouTube archiving solution with a web interface. It can subscribe to channels, automatically download new videos, and even integrates with Jellyfin for media management. It’s Docker-based and pretty user-friendly.

3. YoutubeDL-Material:
Another web-based frontend for youtube-dl/yt-dlp. It supports subscriptions, automatic downloads, and has a nice UI. You can set it up with Docker as well.

If you ever want to grab transcripts along with your videos, tools like Transcriptly can help automate transcript extraction.

Tube Archivist is probably the closest to what you want, especially with Jellyfin integration. Otherwise, a simple yt-dlp script and a cron job can get you 90% of the way there.

Which one do you use finally?

This is awesome—thanks for sharing your project! I totally get the struggle of finding a YouTube downloader that checks all the boxes, so it’s great to see someone building a solution that’s easy to deploy with Docker and has a user-friendly interface.

One feature I’d personally love to see is transcript support. Being able to download not just the video, but also the YouTube transcript (or even auto-generate one for videos without captions) would be super useful for people who want to archive or search video content. Maybe integration with something like Transcriptly or OpenAI’s Whisper could be an interesting addition down the line.

Anyway, thanks again for making this open source! I’ll give it a try. Looking forward to seeing how this project evolves!