Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

I basically have an even simpler version of something like this for my own personal use too. I found it pretty easy to write in Go and my area of expertise is decidedly not web frontend/backend. I’d recommend it as a fun little project if you’re looking for something to do.

For mine, I paste in a video or playlist URL and it downloads the video and creates a lower resolution transcoded version suitable for streaming to my phone. It also extracts an audio-only version in case that’s more appropriate.

I have one too, it's honestly a very fun area to program around, and I'm not going to be surprised if this thread is full of me-toos.

Mine is specifically meant to help get videos onto plex in exactly the way we want - with particular emphasis on playlists, taking the numbering and putting it in plex format, and transcoding any codecs (detected via ffprobe) i know certain shitty players (smart TVs) will have issues with. Along with putting it in the right spot on the filesystem with the right permissions and user+group set so it serves correctly over samba too (for management from windows / via GUI).

Have a repo you can share?

I have something similar as a simple PHP script on a shared hosting service. I can't PHP well anymore so it's probably the worst and most insecure code I've produced by a big margin. Does it do the job? Yes.

Plex is the destination for my setup, too. I have a bookmarklet I can click when I'm on any Youtube (or other video) page that sends the URL to a local Flask app that's just a wrapper for calling yt-dlp with the right args and post-processing.

Interesting! How do you stream it to your phone? I imagine its on the local network?

No unfortunately, not only is it too tangled (not irredeemably, but I've never made an effort t try to make it cleanly ploppable) with the rest of my home-rails-server monolith, but the code is all also ridiculously bad, written in 2000 separate 5 minute scraps of time, all while standing up and holding at least one baby.

I call it "dadware".