you're downloading youtube videos to watch in vlc?

Yes. YouTube still thinks my partner and my accounts are in different countries so we couldn’t get Premium Family (for the past 4 years) and I’m not about to purchase separate subscriptions. So I have a backend that I can send YouTube URLs to running on my Mac Mini that gets the videos with yt-dlp.

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dd8601fn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> So I have a backend that I can send YouTube URLs to running on my Mac Mini that gets the videos with yt-dlp.

I do this too with a mac mini app that does it on schedules across all the channels I like, dumps them in JellyFin with channel art, culls old videos, and uses the Jellyfin api to reindex that category when done.

I just like the lack of ads and no separate YouTube interface… YouTube is just a category in JellyFin.

yt-dlp has gotten spotty about YouTube blocking it, from time to time, though.

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frantathefranta 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you don't mind me asking, how does your YouTube video discovery looks like?

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jonpurdy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't mind at all. So I had ~100 subscriptions as of a few years ago and I tend to just look at the Subscriptions page, view what's been released since the last time I checked, and download those.

I sometimes see the homepage, or see thumbnails when I click to download individual videos. I've previously found interesting channels that way, or recommended by creators in videos I watch, or even on HN.

(I've found their algorithm has gotten worse over time, and nosedived recently with AI slop propagating like crazy in 2026. Even for niche topics it'll recommend channels that are a month old, already have 60 videos (mostly with low views but one video with 100K+ views), and obviously AI generated when closely inspected. It's worse now because half the channels use AI thumbnails for non-AI content.)

So after that long answer, I don't have a great recommendation for discovery if you don't already have an existing list of channels you like and trust.

	▲	chocochunks 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There's a tool built on top of yt-dlp, ytdl-sub that can automate it for you. It will check if there's new vids in the channels you're interested in and download them and can make metadata for Kodi, Plex, etc. for them too. It can also delete old ones if you want.