newsboat_video_downloader

I sure love the mix of newsboat+mpv+yt-dlp to watch videos from my favourite creators directly from my command line. But sometimes I want to download them beforehand and have them sorted into different folders. Here is the script to do exactly that.

Installation

Clone this directory and put the bash script in a directory you've got in your $PATH.

Configure

DATABASELOC="$XDG_DATA_HOME/newsboat/cache.db"
WEBSITEURLLIST="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/newsboat/websitelist"
VIDEOFOLDER="$HOME/Videos"

DATABASELOC

The location of your cache.db. The newsboat default is ~/.newsboat/cache.db.

WEBSITELISTURL

A file where you define from which websites you want to download the videos from. Put this file wherever you like.

Example

https://www.youtube.com
https://www.odysee.com

VIDEOFOLDER

The directory where you want your Videos to be downloaded in. Default is: ~/Videos/.

Usage

Just execute the script and the videos will be downloaded in your configured directory and sorted after the creator of the video.

usage: newsboat_video_downloader [-h] [-a AUTHOR] [-m]

optional arguments:
  -h,                      show this help message and exit
  -a, AUTHOR               Download only the videos by a specific creator
  -m,                      Enabled the marking mode which will mark the videos as watched in newsboat
  -d,                      Enables the detox mode and will execute detox in the video directory after downloading

Personal preferences

I've implemented a few personal preferences directly as I don't expect many people to use this script.

File locations

See chapter Configure.

yt-dlp

I've configured yt-dlp to download the videos as mp4 and embed the thumbnails if you dont want that just change.

# newsboat_video_downloader.sh
59: yt-dlp --format mp4 --embed-thumbnail -o "$VIDEOFOLDER/%(uploader)s/%(title)s.%(ext)s" -a /tmp/videolist

to:

# newsboat_video_downloader.sh
59: yt-dlp -o "$VIDEOFOLDER/%(uploader)s/%(title)s.%(ext)s" -a /tmp/videolist

detox

I like my files neat and tidy with reasonable names. I use detox for that. Using the -d flag activates detox after ddownloading all the videos.

update

-m marks all downloaded videos as read in newsboat. Personally I've disabled that as I use newsboat as a client for miniflux which doesn't care about changes made to cache.db