Overview
Tube Archivist lets you subscribe to YouTube channels, download videos with yt-dlp, and browse your collection through a polished web interface. It indexes video metadata — titles, descriptions, thumbnails, subtitles — into Elasticsearch for full-text search. Watch progress is tracked per user, and the interface resembles a private YouTube clone. Deployment requires Docker Compose with Elasticsearch and Redis as companion services.
Where it falls short of Plex
- Requires Elasticsearch, which is memory-intensive (1 GB+ RAM minimum).
- No transcoding; playback quality depends on the downloaded file format.
- Cannot stream live YouTube content; archive-only.
- No multi-user access control beyond a basic admin/user split.
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
Tags
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Embed the Tube Archivist difficulty badge in your README — it links back here.
[](https://openreplace.com/tube-archivist)Similar open-source projects
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