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kura

Capturing videos and playlists

Archive a single video, a playlist in order, a search query, or a music album, each into its own self-contained repository.

A channel is just one kind of target. kura captures several others, each into its own self-contained repository.

A single video

Pass a video id or any watch URL. No setup is needed for a public video:

kura archive dQw4w9WgXcQ
kura archive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
kura archive https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

The id grammar matches ytb: the 11-character id, watch?v=, youtu.be, /shorts/, and /embed/ URLs all resolve to the same video. A single-video capture is unbounded by --max: it is just the one video and its sidecars.

Add the playable stream with --depth media:

kura archive dQw4w9WgXcQ --depth media

A playlist

Pass a PL... or UU... playlist id and kura captures the playlist record plus every video in it, in order:

kura archive PLxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A playlist capture is unbounded too: it takes the whole list. The playlists/ folder records the playlist and its video-id order, so the rendered home lists the videos as the playlist orders them rather than by date.

--search archives a search instead of a channel. Quote the query:

kura archive --search "lofi mix" --max 200

Search is paged, so bound the result count with --max (it defaults to 1000 for a search, like a channel).

A music album

--album captures a music album and its tracks. Pair it with --depth audio for an offline audio archive:

kura archive --album <id> --depth audio -x

Where each target lands

Each target writes one self-contained repository under <out>/youtube/<root>:

Target Root
Video dQw4w9WgXcQ video-dqw4w9wgxcq
Channel @MKBHD @mkbhd
Playlist PLxxxx playlist-plxxxx
Search lofi mix search-lofi-mix
Album <id> the lowercased album id

Two captures of the same target land in the same repo and merge. See repository layout for the full tree.

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