youtube-subscriber is a script that downloads and serves youtube videos from
channels.
You can find a preview in the preview.png file.
Here's a tutorial on how to use it:
SETUP:
------
You need to start by setting up the environment. Pick a folder (say
$HOME/youtube) which will hold all the videos and metadata and execute:
yt-subscriber setup $HOME/youtube
MANAGING SUBSCRIPTIONS:
-----------------------
To subscribe to a channel you need to find the channel's ID (refer to the bottom
of this document to see how to accomplish that). Once you've obtained the id
you can execute the following command: (this id corresponds to the Kurzgesagt
channel)
yt-subscriber subscribe UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q
To unsubscribe from the channel you can run
yt-subscriber unsubscribe UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q
To list all your subscriptions you can run
yt-subscriber list
DOWNLOADING AND SERVING:
------------------------
To download the latest 5 videos of every subscription in highest definition you
can execute:
yt-subscriber sync
To modify the limit (5) to something else, or to modify the format of the video
downloaded you can edit the yt-subscriber configuration file which resides in
$HOME/.yt-subscriber.conf
Finally, to serve the videos you need to host them somewhere. Assuming you ran
a server in your $HOME/youtube folder on port 8080 (e.g. by running
`php -S localhost:8080` in $HOME/youtube) you can execute
yt-subscriber serve "http://localhost:8080/downloads" > output.html
firefox output.html
Assuming you do not want to host the files somewhere you can also use
yt-subscriber serve "file://$HOME/youtube/downloads" > output.html
You can also specify the template by providing it as an extra parameter
yt-subscriber server "file://$HOME/youtube/downloads" tmp.htm > output.html
USEFUL FILES:
-------------
- $HOME/youtube/yt-subscriber.log contains a list of all the things
yt-subscriber was used for (and what it did).
- $HOME/youtube/downloads/*/videos.tsv is a bunch of tab-seperated values
listing all the info about the downloaded videos of the channel. The first
column is the id of the video, the second is the publishing date, and the
last is the title of the video.
HOW TO FIND A CHANNEL'S ID:
---------------------------
If you are already subscribed to a channel you can get its ID by navigating
to the channel's URL from your list of subscriptions via the sidebar on the left
inside Youtube.
Otherwise you can navigate to the channel's webpage, open up the source of the
webpage (or prepend the URL with view-source:) and search for "channelId" and
copy the value next to first match (it should look something like the one in
the example above)