yt-mirror

Do you use YouTube to listen to music, and you save it in bookmarks? I do. It would be cool to have all this music on your local PC as a backup or just offline access, wouldn't it?

yt-mirror parses your browser bookmarks, looks for YouTube URLs, downloads movies, and converts them to a music file. It runs incrementally, so you can synchronize videos as they are added up - only new bookmarks will be downloaded.

This tool is still in active development

Currently it works only on Linux (dependency on mv command, and Linux directory structure for data location, and defaults).

Supported browsers

• Firefox
• Chrome/Chromium/Edge (and possibly other Chromium-based browsers)

Requirements

• ffmpeg
• yt-dlp

Installation

Requires Cargo (Rust)

cargo install yt-mirror

Usage

Start by running the command yt-mirror once, without any arguments.

yt-mirror

It should create default config in ~/.config/yt-mirror/config.toml. Inside, you should modify target_dir (where your music will be downloaded) and bookmark_files list (see Bookmarks location). At least one bookmarks_files entry must be provided.

Example minimal config:

bookmark_files = ["~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Bookmarks"]
target_dir = "~/music"

Then prepare bookmarks to synchronize:

yt-mirror prepare

Then run synchronization:

yt-mirror synchronize

(you can quit synchronization by pressing CTRL+C or ESC)

To show failed synchronizations:

yt-mirror failed [-s/--short]

-s/--short prints only failed YouTube ids without any decorations

If synchronization fail you can always try synchronizing failed bookmarks using -r/--retry:

yt-mirror synchronize -r

Filtering videos to download

Using --filter user can utilise full power of youtube-dl --match-filter. It is useful to skip some videos, like those annoying 10h music videos that are sometimes added to bookmarks.

If video is filtered its process will be marked as "skipped".

Example - to download only videos with duration lower than 1000s:

yt-mirror synchronize --filter "duration < 1000"

Configuration

You can pass custom configuration file location to any command using -c/--config parameter:

yt-mirror prepare -c ~/my-config-location.toml

Example full config:

# List of bookmark files to prepare (and eventually synchronize)
bookmark_files = ["~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Bookmarks"]
# target_dir is where your files will be moved after downloading
target_dir = "~/music"
# data_dir is used to store process bookmarks, and for other persistent data
# default: $XDG_DATA_HOME/yt-mirror or ~/.local/share/yt-mirror
data_dir = "~/my-data-dir"
# tmp_dir is used as location for temporary files
# default: /tmp
tmp_dir = "~/my-tmp-dir"

Bookmarks locations

.	Linux	Windows
Firefox	~/.mozilla/firefox/*/places.sqlite	%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*\places.sqlite
Chrome	~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Bookmarks	%appdata%\..\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Bookmarks
Chromium	~/.config/chromium/Default/Bookmarks	?
Brave	~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Bookmarks	%appdata%\..\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default