Made some more progress on my #YouTubeDL #subtitles / #captions retrieval and formatting server script.

Caching of the video metadata and TTML captions works now, which should reduce the amount of calls to the #YouTube (or other #StreamingMedia service) servers while testing.

I can now prepend a YouTube URL with my own test server's URL, and I'll get a simple text / markdown file with the video's channel name, title, upload and retrieval date, some other metadata I'm interested in, and most importantly: its manual or automatic captions in as legible plain text format as I can get it.

Once I can't think of any more improvements to add, I'll clean up the code, and publish it in a public repository.

I won't run my own public instance of it unfortunately, as I'd rather not risk my IP getting blacklisted for excessive YouTubeDL calls, but hopefully others will run with it and host their own, similar to #Invidious.

In addition to a webserver frontend and its command-line interface, I hope to add a standalone graphical user interface too, so you can just run it straight from your desktop too. Though I might need some help with this.

It currently relies on youtube-dl, but I guess it might also be a good idea to add support for the official #YouTubeData #API.

#coding #ScratchYourOwnItches