Introduction

A simple collection of scripts, which use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp, to download all videos in your youtube watch-later playlist. It also purges videos, which are no longer in the playlist and adjusts the video files' date to the upload date of the video.

Installation

Clone this repository e.g. to ~/ytdlwl.

0. Make scripts executable:

chmod +x install-yt-dlp.sh
chmod +x update_wl.sh

1. install venv: Adapt the version number to your python version accordingly

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
sudo apt install python3.9-venv
python3 -m venv ytdlwl
source ytdlwl/bin/activate
./install-yt-dlp.sh

2. setup cron job

crontab -e

Add the following line to start the update daily at 3:00 am

0 3 * * * /usr/bin/flock -w 0 ~/ytdlwl/update_wl.lock ~/ytdlwl/update_wl.sh > ~/ytdlwl/update_wl.log 2>&1

flock prevents overlapping runs. For a daily job it might not be necessary, but it is also useful for testing purposes (just write * * * * *, so start it once a minute).

Update cookies

The yt-dlp logsin to youtube using cookies:

1. Start firefox and install addon "export cookies"
2. login to youtube and select the channel to access
3. Export cookies from www.youtube.com.
4. Save as ~/ytdlwl/cookies/cookies.txt