When I first got with my wife I seemed a bit crazier than I am because I am a media hoarder for 30+ years. I don't have any VHS, DVDs, etc. laying around because I only keep digital copies, but I have pretty decent archives. Nothing important really, just normal stuff and some rare or obscure stuff that disappears over time.

My wife was interested in the idea that I was running "Netfix from home" and enjoyed the lack of ads or BS when we watched any content. I never really thought I would be an "example" or anything like that - I fully expected everyone else to embrace streaming for the rest of time because I didn't think those companies would make so many mistakes. I've been telling people for the last decade "That's awesome I watch using my own thing, what shows are your favorites I want to make sure I have them"

In the last 2 years more family members and friends have requested access to my Jellyfin and asked me to setup a similar setup with less storage underneath their TV in the living room or in a closet.

Recently-ish we have expanded our Jellyfin to have some YouTube content on it. Each channel just gets a directory and gets this command ran:

    yt-dlp "$CHANNEL_URL" \
      --download-archive "downloaded.txt" \
      --playlist-end 10 \
      --match-filters "live_status = 'not_live' & webpage_url!*='/shorts/' & original_url!*='/shorts/'" \
      -f "bv*[height<=720]+ba/b[height<=720]" \
      --merge-output-format mp4 \
      -o "%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s"

I have set up a Plex server and started ripping shows from various streaming providers (using StreamFab mostly) specifically because my wife got frustrated with 1) ads starting to appear even on paid plans and 2) never-ending game of musical chairs where shows move from provider to provider, requiring you to maintain several subscriptions to continue watching. She's not a techie at all, she's just pissed off, and I know she's not the only one.

Let's make sure that when all those people come looking for solutions, they'll find ones that are easy to set up and mostly "just work", at least to the extent this can be done given that content providers are always going to be hostile.

First I ran a simple script, now I use ytdltt [1] to allow my mother via telegram bot to download YT videos (in her case its more like audiobooks) and sort them in directories so she can access/download it via jellyfin. Shes at around 1.2TB audiobooks in like 3 years.

1: https://github.com/entropie/ytdltt

> It actually fails to do what I want here and download h264 content so I have it re-encoded

I struggled with that myself (yt-dlp documentation could use some work). What's currently working for me is:

    yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[width<800][vcodec~='^(avc|h264)']+bestaudio[acodec~='^((mp|aa))']"

Checkout https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

use the new preset feature to get h264: -t mp4

you can also skip the match filters by running the /videos URL instead of the main channel url.

if you want 720p, use -S res:720

I'll just mention ytcc here. Not a recommendation, but might be suitable for someone.

https://pypi.org/project/ytcc/

I recently discovered Pinchflat [1], which seems like an *arr-inspired web alternative, and works great for me - I just need to add the videos I want downloaded to a playlist and it picks them up. Also uses yt-dlp under the hood.

1. https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

Tried this: "yt-dlp -f 'bestvideo*[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best' -S vcodec:h264 -other_options …" ? I'm still getting proper h264 with that (my Raspberry PI 3 only wants a proper codec too… none of that mushy new-era codec stuff. ;) )

>fails to do what I want here and download h264 content

you are missing [vcodec^=avc1] ?

Do you have to put in cookies to avoid the sign in/bot prompt? Do you use a vpn to download yt videos?