Ive just been downloading videos direct with yt-dlp, but I think I’m going to extend it into a bash script which fetches the RSS of the channels I want, downloads them if they haven’t been downloaded, and then deletes them after they have been watched and after a certain amount of time has passed, or if I have marked them for deletion.

I wrote something a while back in bash that pulls down a channel with yt-dlp, remembers already-downloaded stuff, and doesn’t redownload. Has a menu interface showing a list of “subscribed” channels to pull from. If you want, I’ll throw you a copy.

I’d do stuff like this with caution, as YouTube temp-IP-banned me from anonymous use for something like a month after I sucked down the contents of an enormous channel in a relatively-short time. At the very least, I’d suggest having it put a cap on how much it downloads by default so that you don’t inadvertently pull down way more than expected and run into trouble with YouTube. My own script doesn’t presently have such a cap.