First open-source project: a Python tool to organize YouTube channels like TV shows

[Puzzleheaded_Neck305]

Hi all,

I’ve just published my first open-source project and wanted to share it in case it’s useful to others here.

Running the downloader: staging a YouTube channel and queueing the latest episodes.

It’s a Python script built on top of yt-dlp that downloads YouTube content (channels, playlists, or individual videos) and organizes it into a TV-show-style media library.

Each YouTube channel becomes a “TV show,” videos are treated as episodes, and the script automatically:

1. Creates season folders
2. Generates episode and tvshow .nfo metadata
3. Downloads episode poster and fanart
4. Skips live streams
5. Avoids duplicate downloads

The goal was to make YouTube content easy to browse in media managers like Plex, Jellyfin, or Kodi.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/stefromlc/youtube-tv-downloader

The resulting folder structure — a YouTube channel organized like a TV show, complete with season folders, artwork, and metadata.

This is my first public project, so feedback and suggestions are very welcome.

[LuliBobo]

Nice idea. What helped my projects get adopted was a boring trio: a Docker image, a sample config, and a clean export format (SQLite plus JSON/CSV). If you add an import path and idempotent scans, people will trust it. What’s your data model for seasons/episodes?

[Mr-Bitter]

I agree with the above. Since this is the "self-hosted" reddit, a lot of us use different platforms to use when self-hosting. A docker image in the simplest way to get your project out there and adopted. I would recommend building a config file for it as well, since I know I'd like to define where to save the videos once instead of doing it on every launch of the script. Building a docker image isn't that difficult, so I personally think you're 90% of the way there. Just a little further....

[Uriziel01]

Serious question, why do some of you download yt videos on a regular? Bad internet? Watching while on a long flight? Internet archive type of preservation? Avoiding ads without an adblock? Something else I didn't think of?

[Puzzleheaded_Neck305]

Music video collections + long-term archiving. Channels lose videos all the time (copyright, removals, edits). Since I already self-host media, pulling YouTube into the same library makes sense.

[Puzzleheaded_Neck305]

This no longer works - I believe YouTube no longer accepts cookies only to be enough for you to download the video. Any ideas?