Easier ways to mass archive entire channels

[BigFlubba]

I have a lot of channels added and I have found adding content to be a bit tedious. I want to able to mass archive entire channels without the need to enable monitoring for every video type for every channel, download all for each type while waiting for indexing, & repeat for every channel and video type.

An option that comes to mind is channel profiles with the option to enable everything by default.

While we are at it. Download all and the indexing task should be allowed to run in the background so mobile users arn't forced to stay on the page while a large channel is indexing.

[dialmaster]

I have good news on one portion of this:
The indexing already works the way you're hoping. It runs on the server, not in your browser. Once it starts (Load More, or the fetch that runs when you open Download All), you can leave the page, close the tab, or lock your phone and it keeps going. Everything gets saved as it finishes, and when you come back to the channel page it notices the fetch is still running, shows the progress bar again, and refreshes the list when it's done.

Same for Download All itself: the downloads are a queued job on the server. Once it's queued you can watch it from the Downloads page or just walk away.

The one spot where you do have to stick around is the Download All confirmation dialog. It indexes the channel first so it can show you an accurate "you're about to download X videos" count, and you can't hit Continue until that finishes. On a big channel that wait can be long, and I agree that's annoying on mobile. I plan to look at making that step friendlier, for example by skipping the re-index when the channel was indexed recently.

[BigFlubba]

If saving the channel index will be a thing. Mite as well have Youtarr run a full channel index in the background when adding a new channel to save time. Yes this will take a while upfront, but it will save time later. Once that initial index has been done you can reference on it for changed titles or removed videos basically how Pinchflat handles it (but not exactly) with an inital full (slow index) then the option for fast indexing.

I would also like the ability to have less clicking and manual setup to be done on my part. For all of the channels I have (37 in my case) I am trying to archive the entire channel (shorts, long-form videos, & live streams). That is over 110+ clicks, indexes, and confirmations I have to do to get that result. Thats where I believe default settings for video types and more would help.

While I absolutly love the granular control Youtarr has, I do believe more defaults should be added with custom presets. Exactly how media profiles work on Pinchflat. As always I can set overrides on a per channel basis if needed.

Full disclosure: I was a maintainer (mostly for the repo and socials) for Tubeless (Pinchflat fork). I am not looking for another Pinchflat, but I do believe some features Pinchflat has Youtarr can benefit from. As always I want Youtarr to be unique in it's own ways.

In all seriousness, I have been loving Youtarr and I appreciate all the work that has been done to get it where it is now.

[dialmaster]

There are a lot of improvements that I would like to make to Youtarr, and I am trying to work through them as I have time, but my primary limiting factor is time. This is a free product that I work on in my spare time. I want to do everything I can do make it better for my users, but I have a full time job and 3 kids, so there is only so much that I can get done and I have to prioritize the open issues, with fixes for actual bugs always being my first priority. I don't have a team working with me -- I am the basically the sole maintainer. If you want to join my Discord (linked from the README), I'm happy to discuss things and if you are interested in picking up some work that would be great.

We also have to ensure that everything is properly regression tested so that any changes that are made do not break existing funcitonality for users.

As far as running full channel indexes in the background -- that's a good idea as well, but as also have to think about rate limiting and ensuring that users can't kick off "too many" things at once, which can cause temporary IP bans from YouTube.

[BigFlubba]

I fully understand. After all, you have probably not made a single penny on this project (except donations) and are doing it for the love of doing it. My limiting factor is time and money, lol. Sure, not a problem. I will be honest that I am a noob at coding and I do what I can, but if help is needed on socials or the frontend of things, then that's fine.

Makes sense.

Right! Maybe a concurrent job run of 1 at a time, but with others queued.