The database acts as a permanent archive of video metadata including title, description, duration, view count, and more. Even if a video or channel is deleted from Youtube, you will still have this information. Perfect for never losing track of unlisted videos, too.
The thumbnails, however, are not stored in the database, but you can use `utilities\download_thumbnails.py` to download them.
Note: At this time, refreshing a channel in YCDL will update video titles, descriptions, and view counts with their current values. If you refresh a channel after they have changed their video's title or description you will lose the previous value.
When I discover a channel, I like to watch through the videos over the course of weeks or months. Within Youtube's own interface, there is no good way to filter videos you've watched from videos you haven't. Scrolling through all of a channel's videos to find ones you haven't seen is tough.
On Youtube's subscription page, there is a button to hide a video from the list. I would often press this hide button after watching a video, only to find it come back a few days later. Don't get me started on live broadcasts or premieres -- hiding those was never reliable. YCDL makes watching my subscriptions much easier.
YCDL does not perform the downloading of videos itself. [youtube-dl](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl) is the tool for that. When you click on the download button, it will create an empty file called `xxxxxxxxxxx.ytqueue` in the directory specified by the `ycdl.json` config file. You should create a separate shell / Python script that watches for ytqueue files and calls youtube-dl with your preferred arguments.
The reason for this is that youtube-dl is extremely configurable. Every user might prefer a completely different set of arguments and formatting. Rather than attempting to provide an interface for that in YCDL, my goal is to get you the video IDs so you can pass them into your favorite youtube-dl configuration.
You are responsible for your own `youtube_credentials.py` file on your PYTHONPATH, with a function `get_youtube_key`. YCDL will `import youtube_credentials` and call `youtube_credentials.get_youtube_key()` with no arguments. It should return a Youtube API key. Here is how to get one:
Here is a javascript bookmarklet that you can click while on youtube.com to be redirected to the same URL on your YCDL server. Mainly for `/channel` and `/watch` URLs.
