Ethan Dalool 2f5ec40b89 Big: Object-oriented channels & videos, match Etiquette structure.

- Channels and videos are now objects instead of just dictionaries.
- Copied Etiquette's use of cachemanager mixin to cache those objects.
- Copied Etiquette's use of sql_ methods.
- Copied Etiquette's use of namespaced javascript.
- Copied Etiquette's use of config file.
- Redid video_card css to use grid, better on mobile.
- Improved usage of URL parameters with class=merge_class.
- Wrote some actual content on readme.

2020-04-05 18:59:16 -07:00

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Youtube Channel Downloader

YouTubeChannelDownloader creates an SQLite3 database of Youtube channels and their videos, and serves it out of a web server.

YCDL solves three main problems:

Metadata archive

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.

Easily watch every video on the channel

When I discover a channel, I like to watch through their videos over the course of weeks or months. Within Youtube's own interface, it becomes difficult to know which videos I've watched and which ones I haven't. Scrolling through all of a channel's videos is tough especially if there are many.

In YCDL, videos start off as pending and you can mark them as ignore or download, so the pending page is always your "to-watch" list.

On my Youtube subscription box, I would often press the "hide" button on videos only to find them come back a few days later, and hiding live broadcasts was never reliable. YCDL makes watching my subscriptions much easier.

Send video IDs to youtube-dl

YCDL does not perform the downloading of videos itself. 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 can send this ID into youtube-dl in your preferred way.