a bash script to create and maintain backups of youtube playlists

I personally use this one to maintain my collection of 300+ notable videos

features

• only downloads missing videos
• metadata, thumbnails, subtitles
• structed naming (with automatic reordering)

needs

• bash (v4.0+)
• yt-dlp (latest recommended)
• jq (to process json)
• sponge (from moreutils)

quick start

download the script

create directory for the playlist

mkdir playlist && cd playlist
echo "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=..." > url

run the script

yt-pl-mirror

notes

usage:

yt-pl-mirror [DIRECTORY]

if no directory specified, uses the current working one

file structure

playlist/
├── 01 title - channel [ID].info.json # indices are zero-padded
├── 01 title - channel [ID].mkv
├── 01 title - channel [ID].webp
├── ...
├── ids # list of playlist's video ids
├── playlist.info.json
├── playlist.webp
└── url # playlist's url

my yt-dlp config (for reference)

--cookies-from-browser firefox

--js-runtimes node
--remote-components ejs:github

--concurrent-fragments 12

--merge-output-format "mkv"

automatization

you can include it into your (ana)crontab, so that it runs regularly