bingewatch

bingewatch is a utility to automatically download the most recent videos from any YouTube channel for offline viewing.

It is designed to be as simple as possible, wrapping yt-dlp for all the heavy lifting and YouTube interaction. What it adds is the ability to follow users and channels in a straightforward, lightweight manner.

There is intentionally no database or interface. Bingewatch just downloads new videos and drops them into a directory per channel; that's it. After that you can do whatever you like with them.

Setup

Bingewatch is not designed to be installed in the normal way. It is a single, self-contained Python script, intended to be directly copied into place and run.

The way I use this is to have an external USB drive containing the binge script along with the configuration file and all my cached videos. This drive can then be plugged into any machine that has yt-dlp and ffmpeg available. binge depends only on these two external commands and Python itself (which must be available if yt-dlp is installed.) Only libraries in the Python standard library are used, so there's no need to install additional dependencies.

Use

Adding channels

To add a channel for bingewatch to monitor, run:

$ ./binge add NAME URL

NAME is the name by which you want to refer to the channel. Bingewatch will create a subdirectory of this name in the current directory and store the channel's videos and archive file there.

URL can be any of:

• the URL of any YouTube video
• the URL of a channel homepage
• the URL of a user's homepage

All will have the same result; this allows you to just throw any video URL at bingewatch and it will add the channel that the video is from.

If for some reason you already have the ID of the channel you're interested in (a long string starting with UC) you can use that in place of the URL.

Downloading

Just run ./binge to download new videos.

Channels are processed in order; if you're short on time or space feel free to edit channels.txt to prioritize those you're most interested in by moving them higher up the file.

You can temporarily ignore a channel by commenting out its line with a leading #

Scanning

Run ./binge show to just list new videos without downloading them. This is essentially a dry run, and otherwise works exactly like normal Bingewatch invocation.

Caveats

The YouTube channel RSS feeds only contain the most recent 15 videos. If your checking interval is longer than the time it takes the channel to post 15 new videos, you could miss content. In this case it's possible to use yt-dlp directly in the channel directory; just make sure you use --download-archive seen.txt to avoid duplication and update the archive file.

Extras

rclone can be a convenient way to serve your cached videos, allowing easy viewing on TVs, iPads, and other devices.

To run a DLNA media server for your videos, try:

$ rclone serve dlna --read-only --dir-cache-time 0 --exclude '.*' --exclude '.*/' .

To make them available over HTTP:

$ rclone serve http --addr :8080 --read-only --dir-cache-time 0 --exclude '.*' --exclude '.*/' .