RELATED > Home Assistant: Making My Plants Talk with IoT Sensors and a Python Script For our purposes here we’re going to archive an entire channel/playlist, and then set some scripts up to check for new future videos on those channels, with all the metadata and thumbnails. Looking over the youtube-dl docs you will see there are quite a few options for what to download and how to add those files. Sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

In Linux this is accomplished at a shell: sudo curl -L -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl You will need to install it according to the manual instructions because inevitably the package for your OS will be out of date. That’s all we need to do on the Plex side. Now we can create a Youtube library of type “TV Shows” if we enable our media agent and scanner here: Restart Plex Media Server, and go on over to the Server settings page, enable the new media agents here: Installing is fairly straightforward, copy the files to the appropriate directories for your operating system. If you select “TV Shows” as the type of library it won’t show any videos at all, but if you select “Other Videos” it will refuse to even show manually added metadata.įortunately there is a custom scanner and media agent that makes organizing personal video archives much easier. Some popular channels have TVDB entries, but most don’t.

I like everything to be tidy in my Plex Server, so the immediate problem I noticed with downloading Youtube videos is that Plex doesn’t really have a good way to scrape the the metadata. Getting all the metadata in without doing any work requires a little bit of configuration, and to automate it all takes a few simple shell scripts. Since I cannot stand watching any advertising, am cloud averse, and also don’t like Youtube’s terribly busy interface, I have automated downloading of channels and playlists I follow with the wonderful youtube-dl tool into my Odroid XU4 based Plex Media Server.ĭownloading is pretty straight forward as long as we take care to follow Plex’s file naming guidelines. Recently it appears Youtube has decided they want to become cable TV, complete with the unending commercials for American pharmaceuticals.

Plex media server setup 2017