Of course, I could add it as a Personal Media folder, but then I wouldn’t get any pretty metadata about my YouTube subscriptions. Next up is getting the videos inside of Plex itself. So I did a dry run, and it worked perfectly! I want it to embed metadata, download images, and use SponsorBlock to strip ads out of videos. I stumbled upon Jeeaaasus/youtube-dl, which did what I needed it to - let me customize some yt-dlp configuration options and connect with my YouTube account to download all new videos and my subscriptions.Īfter fiddling around, I figured out my yt-dlp customizations to get it working just how I wanted it. So I figured there must be someone out there that has built a service for automating your subscriptions! My Plex server runs on a Synology NAS (home server) in my apartment and is capable of running a wide variety of software and makes it easy to spin up various open-source software.įirst off was getting YouTube videos downloaded! I’m familiar with using youtube-dl and it’s advanced alternative yt-dlp for downloading one-off videos. So I started exploring all of the open-source software out there to see if I could create something comparable for handling my YouTube subscriptions. It allowed you to access the full YouTube experience from inside of the Plex application.

Years ago, there was a YouTubeTV plugin for Plex, but sadly it’s long been abandoned and no longer works well inside Plex. I subscribe to a few dozen YouTube channels and have a habit of going to the /feed/subscriptions page to catch up on what I’ve missed whenever I take a quick break and want a short video to watch. Only one type of video content is missing from my Plex server right now: my YouTube Subscriptions. It lets me keep track of what I watch in one cohesive place. I pay for most of the streaming services available in Canada, but I still download all my TV and Movies to Plex. It’s a fantastic piece of software that lets you keep all your content in one place and track what you’ve watched (and haven’t watched). I like to keep everything film and TV related in an application called Plex. I consume tons of content: books, articles, podcasts, films, TV, and YouTube videos.

Adding movies to plex