I’ve been using Tube Archivist to archive my YouTube playlists, but I’ve hit a portability snag. It stores all metadata in its internal database and saves video files with non-readable filenames. This makes the archive unreadable without the software and its database, which defeats the point of long-term archival storage.
Are there any tools that:
- Archive playlists with human-readable filenames (or let you control the naming scheme)
- Have an API for queuing archival jobs
- Store metadata in portable formats (e.g., sidecar JSON or YAML)
- Don’t require additional software to interpret the archive
yt-dlp can archive entire playlists and set names to be based on combinations of channel, date and URL. Probably could get an ai to give you a command that downloads a playlist in your format with your naming scheme then uses wget to get a page archive of the same name or extract said metadata from the page.