I’ve been using Tube Archivist to archive my YouTube playlists, but I’ve hit a portability snag. It stores all metadata in its internal database and saves video files with non-readable filenames. This makes the archive unreadable without the software and its database, which defeats the point of long-term archival storage.

Are there any tools that:

  • Archive playlists with human-readable filenames (or let you control the naming scheme)
  • Have an API for queuing archival jobs
  • Store metadata in portable formats (e.g., sidecar JSON or YAML)
  • Don’t require additional software to interpret the archive