Create offline caches of YouTube podcast feeds
- Create one or more directories to contain your desired feeds.
- Create a file in each directory containing the YouTube user/channel/playlist URLs for that feed.
- Run
yt_podoff
on those files:
$ yt_podoff [<youtube-dl_options>... --] <YouTube_url_file> ...
$ mkdir -p ${HOME}/podcasts/Hak5
$ echo "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW5y1tjAOzI0w_GbtiEbYS5PGJ2pmxAIX" > ${HOME}/podcasts/Hak5/.url
$ yt_podoff --write-info-json -- ${HOME}/podcasts/Hak5/.url
I'd already been using the venerable youtube-dl to catch up on several podcasts that had moved to YouTube.
Then a stray Reddit question made me take a second look at my setup, and realize that youtube-dl
was actually quite inefficient at determining which videos to download.
So I rewrote my caching script to process the YouTube RSS feeds instead, and pass the necessary URLs to youtube-dl
.
And I'm now a much happier camper.