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.
• Throttled Rate Limit: Restart download if the download speed drops below this value in KB/s. This will pass the option --throttled-rate to yt-dlp. Using this option might have a negative effect if you have an unstable or slow internet connection.
• 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. Similar to that, --check-formats is passed as well to check that the selected formats are actually downloadable.
• Embed Metadata: This saves the available tags directly into the media file by passing --embed-metadata to yt-dlp.
• Embed Thumbnail: This will save the thumbnail into the media file by passing --embed-thumbnail 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.

Embed thumbnails into media file

This will write or overwrite all thumbnails in the media file using the downloaded thumbnail. This is only necessary if you didn't download the files with the option Embed Thumbnail enabled or want to make sure all media files get the newest thumbnail. Follow the docker-compose logs to monitor progress.

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. There will be a list of all available backup to choose from. The source tag can have these different values:

• manual: For backups manually created from here on the settings page.
• auto: For backups automatically created via a sceduled task.
• update: For backups created after a Tube Archivist update due to changes in the index.
• False: Undefined.

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

Rescan Filesystem

This function will go through all your media files and looks at the whole index to try to find any issues:

• Should the filename not match with the indexed media url, this will rename the video files correctly and update the index with the new link.
• When you delete media files from the filesystem outside of the Tube Archivist interface, this will delete leftover metadata from the index.
• When you have media files that are not indexed yet, this will grab the metadata from YouTube like it was a newly downloaded video. This can be useful when restoring from an older backup file with missing metadata but already downloaded mediafiles. NOTE: This only works if the media files are named in the same convention as Tube Archivist does, particularly the YouTube ID needs to be at the same index in the filename, alternatively see above for Manual Media Files Import.

BE AWARE: There is no undo.