The Itch

MeTube is a neat self-hosted YouTube downloader with a clean web UI. Paste a link, pick your format, hit download. Simple.

Except YouTube decided that simple things shouldn’t stay simple.

At some point, downloads started failing with the lovely “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” message. Classic. YouTube’s bot detection had gotten stricter, the web is not fun anymore.

On top of that, I wanted my downloaded videos to actually show up properly in Jellyfin instead of appearing as mysterious “Unknown” entries with no metadata. Two itches, one fork.

MeTube POT interface

POT (Proof-of-Origin) Support

YouTube’s anti-bot measures work by requiring a “Proof-of-Origin” token, basically proving that the request comes from a legitimate browser session rather than some script hammering their servers.

The fix? bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider. It’s a yt-dlp plugin that generates these POT tokens, making YouTube believe the requests are coming from an actual browser.

Jellyfin Integration

Video properly displayed in Jellyfin with full metadata

Here’s the thing about downloading YouTube videos: yt-dlp can grab a ton of metadata and save it as a .info.json file alongside the video. Title, description, upload date, channel name, tags, duration, everything.

Jellyfin, however, doesn’t speak .info.json. It wants .nfo files, an XML format that media servers have used since the Kodi days.

So I wrote a post-processor hook that runs after each download completes.

It reads the .info.json, extracts the relevant fields, and generates a Jellyfin-compatible .nfo file. The metadata mapping looks like this:

  • Title and Original Title from the video title
  • Plot from the description
  • Year and Premiered from the upload date
  • Studio and Director mapped to the uploader/channel
  • Tags from the video tags (capped at 20 to keep things sane)
  • Runtime converted from seconds to minutes
  • Unique ID storing the YouTube video ID

After generating the .nfo, the hook cleans up by deleting the original .info.json. No leftover clutter.

Keeping Up with Upstream

Creating a meme without Nano Banana 🍌? Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork? Not so fun.

The upstream MeTube repo keeps getting updates: bug fixes, new features, dependency bumps.

I automated this with a GitHub Action (lame, I know) that runs weekly. Here’s what it does:

  1. Fetches the latest upstream release from the original MeTube repo
  2. Checks if it’s already been analyzed (no point in creating duplicate reports)
  3. Generates a diff between the fork and the new release
  4. Sends the diff to an LLM for analysis because, I ain’t got time for that
  5. Creates a GH issue with the analysis report

The result? A nicely formatted issue telling me whether I should bother merging upstream changes or if I can safely ignore them. The boring parts of fork maintenance, automated.

Use it yourself

The fork lives at tatoalo/metube_pot. If you’re running MeTube and hitting YouTube’s bot detection, or you want your downloads to play nice with Jellyfin, give it a spin:

docker pull ghcr.io/tatoalo/metube_pot

Sometimes you just see something that’s 90% of what you need, and the remaining 10% is an afternoon of hacking. Fork stuff, scratch your own itches, automate the tedious parts.

Note: I don’t condone piracy. Use this tool responsibly and ethically. Also, respect YouTube’s terms of service and copyright laws. 🤷‍♂️

Note: This has been done for fun and for research purposes. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️