Skip to content
kura

Archiving a channel

Capture a whole channel's uploads as a catalog or a playable vault, widen it with shorts, live streams, playlists, and community posts, and bound it by time and count.

Archiving a channel is kura's headline job. Point it at a channel and it captures the channel record plus all of its uploads, each video's metadata, thumbnail, transcript, and chapters.

Pointing at a channel

kura accepts the same channel grammar ytb accepts: a @handle, a UC... channel id, or a /c/ or /user/ vanity path.

kura archive @mkbhd
kura archive UCBJycsmduvYEL83R_U4JriQ

The capture is bounded by --max, which defaults to 1000 for a channel so a bare kura archive @channel does not try to pull a whole back catalog by accident. Raise it to go further, or set --max 0 for everything the surface gives:

kura archive @mkbhd --max 3000
kura archive @mkbhd --max 0

Catalog or vault

At the default --depth meta a channel capture is a catalog: records, thumbnails, transcripts, and chapters, but no stream bytes. A 1500-video channel is a few hundred megabytes of JSON, thumbnails, and text that you can read, grep, and browse offline.

Add --depth media to make it a playable vault, downloading the video and audio streams via the native engine:

kura archive @mkbhd --depth media -f bv*+ba/b

See depth and streams for the full model and the format selectors.

Widening the capture

By default a channel capture takes the uploads tab. Four flags widen it to the other tabs:

kura archive @mkbhd --shorts --streams --playlists --community
  • --shorts adds the channel's Shorts.
  • --streams adds its past live streams.
  • --playlists captures the channel's playlists and their video order.
  • --community captures community posts.

Bounding by time

--since, --until, and --since-id bound which uploads the capture covers:

# Just 2025 onward
kura archive @mkbhd --since 2025-01-01

# A fixed span
kura archive @mkbhd --since 2024-01-01 --until 2025-01-01

Both --since and --until accept a bare calendar date (2006-01-02, read as UTC midnight) or a full RFC3339 timestamp. --since-id sets the floor by video id, which is what an incremental kura add uses under the hood.

Sidecars

Add comment and SponsorBlock sidecars per video:

kura archive @mkbhd --comments --sponsorblock

--comments takes --max-comments and --sort top|new. From a flagged IP YouTube hides comments and serves an empty transcript; kura records the gap in the manifest and the rest of the capture proceeds. See the introduction for what is and is not reachable from a gated IP.

Next

3 min read