sinister

sinister is a tool to track and download videos from YouTube.

• sinister
  • features
  • installation
  • config
  • usage
    • update
    • status
    • download
    • mark
    • auto
  • RSS Feeds
  • Contribution

Features

• Tracks your subscription using RSS feeds and download whatever you are interested in.
• Remove the web interface and watch videos in your favorite video player.
• No recommendations, no ads, no distractions.
• Treat Youtube like a news feed.

Installation

You can install sinister by downloading a binary from the releases page.

Or if you have the Go compiler installed. Use

1go install github.com/pspiagicw/sinister@latest

If you use gox to manage binary packages, you can run

gox install github.com/pspiagicw/sinister@latest

Config

To start using sinister, you need to create a config file at /home/<username>/.config/sinister/config.toml

• You can use the --config argument to pass in a alternate config file location.

It should look like this:

1videoFolder = "~/Videos"
2
3urls = [
4"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCeeFfhMcJa1kjtfZAGskOCA",
5"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCdBK94H6oZT2Q7l0-b0xmMg"
6]
7
8quality = "hd720"

• The urls are RSS feeds of the channels you want to sync.
• To extract the RSS feed of a youtube channel, see below

Channel URL don’t work, only RSS feeds work.

Usage

update

• If the config file is set up, you can run sinister update to update the database.
• This will query the RSS feeds for the latest videos and update the databaseo

status

• This shows the state of the database.
• It gives you general statistics like unwatched videos, watched videos, etc.

download

• Only unwatched videos can be downloaded.
• This downloads videos according the prompt given.
• It will download it to the videoFolder specified in the config file.
• The download will be in 720p in the mp4 format.
• After downloading, it will mark the video as watched.

mark

• This can be used to mark a video as watched.
• It can multi-select videos to mark as watched.

auto

• This is a combination of update and download.
• It will update the database and download the latest videos.
• It is designed to be used in a cron job or a systemd timer.
• It can be used to keep your video library up to date.
• It can filter videos according to flags provided.
• See sinister auto --help for more information.

• Filters include --days

Youtube RSS Feeds

There are multiple ways of getting the RSS feed of a youtube channel.

One sureshot method is to view the page source (of the channel page) and search for rss

There are some other resources for this:

• Feeder

Contributing

If you want to contribute, you can open an issue or a pull request on GitHub.

Disclaimer

Downloading videos from Youtube is against their terms of service. Use at your own risk.