Downloading

Once you’ve defined your subscriptions, it’s time to test your configuration and try your first download. As a web scraping tool, it’s important to minimize the requests sent to external services to avoid triggering throttling or bans. Further, a full download of even one subscription can take significant time. Test each change to your subscriptions carefully and quickly as follows.

Preview

Preview what ytdl-sub would do for this subscription. Run the ‘sub’ sub-command with CLI options to restrict requests as much as possible:

• Pull metadata and simulate a download without actually downloading any media files using the --dry-run CLI option.

• Limit requests by narrowing the run to one subscription by giving a subscription name to the --match CLI option.

• Stop after just a few downloads to further minimize requests and make testing faster using the max_downloads setting from yt-dlp.

Change to the directory containing your ./subscriptions.yaml file and run with those options:

cd "/config/ytdl-sub-configs/"
ytdl-sub --dry-run --match="NOVA PBS" sub -o '--ytdl_options.max_downloads 3'

Examine the output carefully, investigate anything that doesn’t look right and repeat this step until everything looks right.

Review

Review the results of real downloads. Run it again without the --dry-run option to actually download media and place the files in your library:

ytdl-sub --match="NOVA PBS" sub -o '--ytdl_options.max_downloads 3'

Examine the output carefully again. Then examine how the resulting downloads work in your library. Repeat with a larger value for max_downloads and examine the output and downloads again.

Next Steps

Once you’re previewed and reviewed successful downloads of each of your subscriptions, you’re ready to run a full download of all your subscriptions. Run the sub-command without the CLI options you used to limit what ytdl-sub does while testing:

ytdl-sub sub

If you’re ready to let ytdl-sub run unattended, it’s time to automate downloads.