Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Invidious

Tube Archivist is a self-hosted application for archiving YouTube content and browsing it like a personal media library. It downloads videos, stores metadata, and provides a web interface to search and play your offline collection.

Key Features

• Subscribe to YouTube channels and periodically rescan for new videos
• Download videos via yt-dlp and manage a download queue
• Index video metadata and enable fast full-text search via Elasticsearch
• Web UI for playback and library browsing
• Track watched/unwatched status for your archive
• Optional integrations such as a companion browser extension and media-server plugins

Use Cases

• Build a personal offline YouTube library for long-term archiving
• Maintain searchable collections for research, tutorials, or education
• Centralize family or team viewing from a shared server

Limitations and Considerations

• Playback compatibility depends on the chosen codecs and browser support
• Any download/extraction limitations of yt-dlp also apply
• Limited flexibility in the naming of downloaded media files

Tube Archivist is well-suited for users who want ownership of their YouTube collection with strong search and library management. It combines automated downloading, indexing, and a convenient playback UI into a single stack.