Started downloading videos from a few YouTube channels. Would be nice to be able to group them by YouTube channel but not really sure there’s a decent way to do that with Plex? Don’t want to create a bunch of separate libraries either.
Looking for any suggestions…
I’ve added some of the local sports podcasts and all I did was create a folder for that “show” and I just add them by date. So for example, on of the is “The Final Drive”. So I create that folder and for this year, I create a Season 2026 folder. When I download the most recent episode I just prepend 2026-mo-day to the name of the episode. Once Plex recognizes it, I just copy the episode name and paste it as the title for that episode in Plex. At some point, I usually try to find an image that I can use as a poster for that “show”.
I’ve searched and there are some guides out on how to do it more automated but they seem to involve a lot work to get setup initially and I’m not really worried about archiving these for any length of time. It’s more like this is my YT DVR and I can watch the at my leisure on TV. I’ll watch a few, then delete them, so I don’t really need to put in too much effort to get it done.
I use youtube downloader and have it embed the metadata (and soon just use nfo files) Then I use a S01Exxx naming schema and format t like a TVs show with a youtube only library to only use local metadata. I dont get channel posters but thats an easy fix.
I’ve only ever done this with one channel. Oversimplified. I included the dates in the file names and by some stroke of luck metadata was available for most of the videos.
I just placed them in the same folder but it was recognized like a TV show with seasons. There are a few that were not recognized. I assume somone did the work of putting that info in imdb, tmdb, or tvdb.
Auto detected show with 2 unrecognized files under unknown season
I found a fairly slick tool called YTDL-SUB that handles the downloads and then updating the metadata inside the file so that it shows in Plex (or other systems) appropriately. Seems pretty slick so far as it handles concerts, music videos, TV Shows, etc. differently.
There’s also an add-on of YTDL that can take the JSON file that it creates and create an NFO file. Unfortunately Plex doesn’t handle NFO’s for anything other than Shows or Movies yet.
A Youtube channel is a show.
