VCRSS

Create your own VCR/TiVo that downloads videos from RSS or Atom feeds using command line tools such as youtube-dl and svtplay-dl.

Why not setup a Raspberry PI or a Digital Ocean VPS and have this thing run continuously using a cron job?

Read more about how I use it this blog post:
My Raspberry Pi based VCR with RSS, youtube-dl and svtplay-dl

Installation

1. Make sure you have Ruby installed.
2. Install a download tool – youtube-dl, svtplay-dl and/or anything similar.
3. Create your config.yml and setup your feed(s).
4. Run ruby vcrss.rb

Configuration

Create a file called config.yml. You can add as many feeds as you need.

Example config.yml

feeds:
  - url: "https://www.foobar.com/baz.xml"
    filters:
      - "Foo"
      - "Bar"
      - "Baz"
    binary: "youtube-dl"
    options: " -f -o 'downloads/foo-bar-baz'"

url (required)
The URL to the RSS feed.

filters
You can specify as many filters as you want. Only videos with titles containing any of these words or phrases will be downloaded.

binary
default: youtube-dl
Specify which binary you want to use to download videos from that feed.

options
default: --all-subs -o 'downloads/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s'
Provide a custom configuration for the binary.

pipes default: ""
Add your pipes of necessary. For example you can achieve streaming to VLC by using:
pipes: " | vlc -"

Example config.yml for SVT Play

If you want to download episodes of Vetenskapens värld then use the following:

feeds:
  - url: "http://www.svtplay.se/vetenskapens-varld/rss.xml"
    binary: "svtplay-dl"
    options: " -f -S -o 'downloads/'"

Some notes on the options that's svtplay-dl specific:

-f overwrites file if it already exists
-S downloads available subtitles

Example using filters

The following will download videos with "Stellaris" in it from the Paradox Interactive YouTube channel.

feeds:
  - url: "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC1JOnWZrVWKzX3UMdpnvuMg"
    filters:
      - "Stellaris"

Example using multiple feeds

feeds:
  - url: "http://www.svtplay.se/vetenskapens-varld/rss.xml"
    binary: "svtplay-dl"
    options: " -f -S -o 'downloads/'"
  - url: "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC1JOnWZrVWKzX3UMdpnvuMg"
    filters:
      - "Stellaris"