youtube-dl

There are so many good video services out there these days. Unfortunately, they mostly depend on you being online to watch the videos. Youtube-dl (and its nicer fork yt-dlp) solve this problem. You can point it at a video on any of dozens of sites, and it will download it so you can watch while offline.

I mostly restrict my kids to watching videos from PBS (they’ve got a ton of great stuff!), but for long car trips, when I most want them to binge videos, they don’t have a way to access the website. I was able to use yt-dlp to copy a bunch of the videos to my computer, then used syncthing to mirror them onto the appropriate tablet for the kid who likes each particular show.

• youtube-dl, the original
• yt-dlp, kept up-to-date, use this
• List of supported services

FLOSSing for lent 29/40