Hacker News Reader

Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

Using yt-dlp + Jellyfin has been a revelation for serving my kids safe, vetted video content. You can even download an entire YouTube channel at once. The kids aren’t at an age where they need that much novelty, so watching old favorites again and again is fine by them.

I should probably also mention that we’re teaching them Chinese, so having an all-Chinese kids media library is invaluable. No English ads to break the immersion - no ads, period.

View on HN

I do exactly this (with emby instead of jellyfin though), with a cron job that runs this:

  #!/bin/bash -x
  
  export IFS="\n"
  find . -type f -name youtube-dl.batchfile | \
    xargs -I {} -n 1 bash -x -c \
      'cd "$(dirname "{}")" && pwd && yt-dlp --config-location youtube-dl.config'

each youtube-dl.batchfile is in a directory that corresponds to an emby library, and is a plain text file where each line is a link to something that yt-dlp understands (usually a youtube channel or playlist). The youtube-dl.config contains (among other things)

  --batch-file youtube-dl.batchfile

to point to the batchfile, and

  --download-archive youtube-dl-archive.txt

so that I don't re-download videos I've already retrieved, and also because it gives me a super quick way to exclude certain videos: either I can just go in and delete the file for a video I don't like (and instead of downloading it again, yt-dlp sees the ID in the archive and doesn't even bother trying to download it), or if I know of some I don't want it ever to download I can just pre-emptively put their IDs in the dl-archive file.

So now when I find a channel I want to download for the kids, I just drop a line in a batchfile and either kick off the cron job by hand or wait.

Another thing I do, on the topic of vetting content for the kids to watch on jellyfin/emby:

tl;dr: ios shortcut -> flask app -> yt-dlp.

I wrote a tiny flask app that runs somewhere on my network, which takes POSTs with two parameters, a link and a name. It passes the link to yt-dlp and then renames the resulting file to "{name}.mp4". (It then also POSTs to emby's endpoint telling it to rescan the library.)

I made a janky ios shortcut does

  "receive any input from share sheet" -> 
  "get urls from {shortcut input}" -> 
  "ask for {text} with {file name}" -> 
  "get contents of {my flask app's URL}"

the last step takes the URL from step 2 and the file name from step 3 and uses those as the POST body. I named this shortcut 'ytdlp'.

So now I'm looking at nearly anything on my phone (youtube, twitter, it even works with tiktok/imgur links from a browser because I only view those from a browser, not their app), hit 'share', choose 'ytdlp' and give it a name, and a couple seconds later that video is ready to watch in emby.

I've archived hundreds of videos this way for the kids over the last couple years.

I’ve done basically the same thing but instead of a custom flask app I have an instance of n8n.io running on a raspberry pi. You just set up an automation to receive a webhook and run a shell command with input from the payload.

Another cool little automation is a webhook from Plex when playback starts turns on the hue lights behind the TV

We're trying to do the same with our kids-- finding kids friendly stations AND appropriate Chinese media. Could you share some of your favorite channels?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com