tubearchivist/docs/Settings.md

Settings Page

Accessible at /settings/ of your Tube Archivist, this page holds all the configurations and additional functionality related to the database.

Click on Update Settings at the bottom of the form to apply your configurations.

Color scheme

Switch between the easy on the eyes dark theme and the burning bright theme.

Archive View

• Page Size: Defines how many results get displayed on a given page. Same value goes for all archive views.

Subscriptions

Settings related to the channel management.

• Channel Page Size: Defines how many pages will get analyzed by Tube Archivist each time you click on Rescan Subscriptions. The default page size used by yt-dlp is 50, that's also the recommended value to set here. Any value higher will slow down the rescan process, for example if you set the value to 51, that means yt-dlp will have to go through 2 pages of results instead of 1 and by that doubling the time that process takes.

Downloads

Settings related to the download process.

• Download Limit: Stop the download process after downloading the set quantity of videos.
• Download Speed Limit: Set your download speed limit in KB/s. This will pass the option --limit-rate to yt-dlp.
• Sleep Interval: Time in seconds to sleep between requests to YouTube. It's a good idea to set this to 3 seconds. Might be necessary to avoid throttling.

Download Format

Additional settings passed to yt-dlp.

• Format: This controls which streams get downloaded and is equivalent to passing --format to yt-dlp. Use one of the recommended one or look at the documentation of yt-dlp. Please note: The option --merge-output-format mp4 is automatically passed to yt-dlp to guarantee browser compatibility.
• Embed Metadata: This saves the available tags directly into the media file by passing --embed-metadata to yt-dlp.

Actions

Additional database functionality.

Manual Media Files Import

So far this depends on the video you are trying to import to be still available on YouTube to get the metadata. Add the files you like to import to the /cache/import folder. Then start the process from the settings page Manual Media Files Import. Make sure to follow one of the two methods below.

Method 1:

Add a matching .json file with the media file. Both files need to have the same base name, for example:

• For the media file: <base-name>.mp4
• For the JSON file: <base-name>.info.json
• Alternate JSON file: <base-name>.json

Tube Archivist then looks for the 'id' key within the JSON file to identify the video.

Method 2:

Detect the YouTube ID from filename, this accepts the default yt-dlp naming convention for file names like:

• <base-name>[<youtube-id>].mp4
• The YouTube ID in square brackets at the end of the filename is the crucial part.

Some notes:

• This will consume the files you put into the import folder: Files will get converted to mp4 if needed (this might take a long time...) and moved to the archive, .json files will get deleted upon completion to avoid having duplicates on the next run.
• Maybe start with a subset of your files to import to make sure everything goes well...
• Follow the logs to monitor progress and errors: docker-compose logs -f tubearchivist.

Backup Database

This will backup your metadata into a zip file. The file will get stored at cache/backup and will contain the necessary files to restore the Elasticsearch index formatted nd-json files plus a complete export of the index in a set of conventional json files.

BE AWARE: This will not backup any media files, just the metadata from the Elasticsearch.

Restore From Backup

The restore functionality will expect the same zip file in cache/backup as created from the Backup database function. This will recreate the index from the snapshot. If there are multiple backup files in the folder, the newest one will take priority.

BE AWARE: This will replace your current index with the one from the backup file. This won't restore any media files.