YT2PC (YouTube to Podcast)

yt2pc is a program that allows you to subscribe to a YouTube playlist as if it were a podcast. It takes care of everything, from listing the episodes to downloading the audio and converting it into a standard format that any device can play.

Requirements

• A YouTube API Key. Can be obtained from the Google Developers Console.

Installation

Docker-compose (using prebuilt image)

If you want to go the easy path, just use this docker-compose example:

services:
  yt2pc:
    image: ghcr.io/cquintana92/yt2pc:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - "./audio_cache:/audio_cache"
    environment:
      YOUTUBE_API_KEY: "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
      SERVER_URL: "https://your.server.url.here"
      PORT: "8080" # Optional. Default is 8080
      
      # If you want to filter the videos using a regex, define it here:
      # FILTER_PATTERN: "#\d+"
    restart: unless-stopped

From source

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/cquintana92/yt2pc.
2. Build the server: go build.
3. Copy the .env.sample file into a .env: cp .env.sample .env.
4. Fill your variables in .env.
5. ./yt2pc.

Docker-compose (self-built)

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/cquintana92/yt2pc.
2. Set up the following docker-compose file:

services:
  yt2pc:
    build: ./
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - "./audio_cache:/audio_cache"
    environment:
      YOUTUBE_API_KEY: "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
      SERVER_URL: "https://your.server.url.here"
      PORT: "8080" # Optional. Default is 8080
      
      # If you want to filter the videos using a regex, define it here:
      # FILTER_PATTERN: "#\d+"
    restart: unless-stopped

Configuration

Here is the documentation of the env variables that you can or must configure.

NAME	REQUIRED	DEFAULT	DESCRIPTION
YOUTUBE_API_KEY	required	""	Your YouTube API Key
SERVER_URL	no	localhost	Your server URL to generate download links for the audio files
PORT	no	8080	Port where the server will listen for incoming connections
FILTER_PATTERN	no	""	Regex that allows you to filter which videos you want to show as episodes. If empty, all videos will appear. Example: #\d+ to show videos with #123.
CONVERT_TO_MP3	no	""	If set to true, forces the conversion to MP3 on the downloaded audio. Otherwise it will download .m4a files. This option increases a lot the download time.

Usage

The server will listen to incoming connections at the port you specified. In order to check if the server is up, you can just try to access the /health route:

Episodes

In order to get the list of episodes, you can enter an URL like the following into your podcast client:

https://your.server.url.here/PLAYLIST_ID.xml

The PLAYLIST_ID is the final part of a playlist URL. That means, if the playlist URL is https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=ABCDEFG, you would need to use ABCDEFG as the PLAYLIST_ID.

This request will give back an OPML response that will list the videos on that playlist as if it were podcast episodes, and an URL that allows the podcast client to download the episodes in M4A/MP3 format.

Keep in mind that when you ask it to download an episode, it may take a while the first time, as it needs to download the audio from the video. If you enable the CONVERT_TO_MP3 option it will take even longer, as it needs to convert it into mp3, which can take some time (depending on the length of the video and the power of your sever). The converted videos are stored in the audio_cache directory, so once it has been downloaded, it won't need to do the process again.

For reference, the URL for downloading an episode is:

https://your.server.here/PLAYLIST_ID/VIDEO_ID

NOTE: The fetching for the playlist videos is cached for 2 hours, so if you re-request the list of episodes from a playlist within that time range, it won't actually fetch it from YouTube. It's an in-memory cache, so if you restart the server it will be evicted.

Healthcheck

If you want to set up a healthcheck you can use the following URL:

$ curl https://your.server.here/health

If you receive an OK response, it means the server is running.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2024 Carlos Quintana

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
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copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
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SOFTWARE.