Tube Archivist

Tube Archivist is a self-hosted application for building and maintaining a local YouTube library. It automates downloading from channels/playlists, enriches videos with metadata, and provides a web interface to browse and stream your archived collection.

Key Features

• Automated downloads for channels and playlists with scheduling and queue-based processing
• Web UI to browse channels, videos, and playlists with progress and library management tools
• Full-text search and filtering over indexed video metadata (powered by Elasticsearch)
• Playback/streaming from your server, including thumbnails and rich metadata pages
• Subtitle support (download and indexing when available)
• Multi-user support with authentication for shared libraries
• Docker-based deployment with companion services (Elasticsearch/Kibana, Redis)

Use Cases

• Maintain an offline archive of educational channels and reference playlists
• Build a private “YouTube library” for a household or team with searchable metadata
• Preserve important videos that may be deleted or region-restricted later

Limitations and Considerations

• Resource usage can be significant for large libraries due to Elasticsearch indexing and thumbnail generation
• Focused on YouTube ingestion; broader multi-site video ingestion depends on yt-dlp support and project configuration

Tube Archivist combines a download pipeline with a media-library-style UI to manage long-term YouTube collections. It is best suited for users who want automated acquisition plus fast search and convenient playback from a curated local archive.