BEbenoau·Sep 24, 2025
Came across this the other day - set of yt-dlp helper scripts loaded up with flags:
https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
In Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloadsTheFrenchGhosty
TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate-YouTube-DL-Scripts-Collection
Shell2022–2025
TheFrenchGhosty / TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate-YouTube-DL-Scripts-Collection
TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate-YouTube-DL-Scripts-Collection
The ultimate collection of scripts for YouTube-DL.
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7Mentions
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2.6KGitHub stars
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The ultimate collection of scripts for YouTube-DL.
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What Hacker News says
7 sourcesYep, just add the channels to a text file and itll download them for you and keep them up to date. Put the script into crontab. Zero running processes and only a couple of KB on disk. That's as Lightweight as you can get.
https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
You could have a shortcut or hotkey that reads it from your clipboard and appends.
Just add the destination dir to your media player (or set it to your videos folder) and you're done.
In MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloaderOn Windows where I'm just doing one off downloads, I put this in an "init.cmd" file in the root of my user directory to create a windows version of an alias. Inside it are:
```
@echo off
doskey yt=yt-dlp "-o [%%(uploader)s] [%%(upload_date)s] [%%(id)s] %%(title).150s.%%(ext)s" $*
doskey yt-u=python -m pip install -U yt-dlp
doskey py-u=python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
```
Hopefully that saves someone some extra googling.
For more hardcore automated archival, I do this on linux (which doesn't have the character length issues) and I'd recommend looking at the following for inspiration
- https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate... (Supports sponsorblock, and it turns out truly finding the best quality is pretty complex)
- https://github.com/dmn001/youtube_channel_archiver (A <config>.conf file is very nice to use.)
Read the rest
- https://github.com/dbeley/youtube-archiver (how to set up a systemd service)
They definitely will be, now that google is looking to more proactively enforce ads.
But the biggest danger is that videos and channels can get removed by any, all, or no reason.
-Copyright middlemen/parasites
-Trolls
-Shifts in what’s politically or advertiser acceptable (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/14ddlng/unalived/)
-Massive data loss (see myspace)
-And especially the capricious whims of the channel owner.
A few years ago I realized an old playlist of mine was basically swiss cheese due to how many videos had been removed.
If you value it, save it now, because it will be gone sooner than you are prepared for.
There are many ways to handle automated saving of channels, including some gui frontends, but offhand the one I use and modify is: https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
In Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radioYou might be intereseted in these youtube archive scripts: https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
In Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stableThe workaround for vanilla youtube-dl is to use it with aria2, with options like:
--external-downloader aria2c
--external-downloader-args "--continue --max-concurrent-downloads=3 --max-connection-per-server=3 --split 3 --min-split-size 1M"
(possibly in your config file)
Also, neither --format best nor --format bestvideo chooses the best encoding in all cases; they use bitrate as a heuristic for quality, and a less efficient codec can have higher bitrate but worse quality, resolution, or framerate. The workaround for this is specifying --format with an enumeration of every combination of codec, resolution, and framerate in preferred order, which goes like this:
--format "(bestvideo[vcodec^=av01][height>=4320][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=vp9.2][hei
Read the rest
ght>=4320] ...
Here's a full example (hmm... they're using it with yt-dlp, which I thought had fixed this?):
https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
I think there's a bit of variation in the exact order among the config files found online. If you're goals are archival, consider also retrieving metadata, thumbnail, and subtitles in all languages; I also have in my config the options:
--verbose
--download-archive ./ytdl-archive.txt
--cookies ./ytdl-cookies.txt
--merge-output-format mkv
--add-metadata --all-subs --embed-subs
--write-info-json --write-thumbnail
--no-overwrites --continue
--force-ipv4
(the only remaining workaround for age-restricted videos is to give it cookies extracted from a browser with a real Google account logged in)