Yearly Season Folders with Plex

Using Absolute Series Scanner, YouTube Agent Bundle and yt-dlp a system can be created for automatically downloading videos from YouTube.

The following naming convention seems to work in making all the Absolute Series Scanner and YouTube-Agent sort YouTube videos by year using folders named after the year that the video has been released:

/Channel Name [Channel ID]/YYYYmmdd - Channel Name - Title [Video ID].webm

with a generated filesystem layout such as:

+-----+ Channel Name [Channel ID]
                  +
                  |
                  +----------------+ YYYYmmdd - Channel Name - Video Title [Video ID].webm
                  |
                  +----------------+ YYYYmmdd - Channel Name - Video Title [Video ID].webm
                  |
                  .
                  .
                  .

In yt-dlp terminology, the following string must be passed to the output parameter corresponding to the layout described above:

/%(uploader)s [%(channel_id)s]/%(upload_date>%Y%m%d)s - %(uploader)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s

Or, script-wise, the following script seems suitable to generate the required layout for every channel or playlist:

#!/bin/sh
###########################################################################
##  Copyright (C) Wizardry and Steamworks 2024 - License: MIT            ##
###########################################################################
 
# Acquire a lock.
LOCK_FILE="/tmp/lock"
if mkdir $LOCK_FILE 2>&1 >/dev/null; then
    trap '{ rm -rf $LOCK_FILE; }' KILL QUIT TERM EXIT INT HUP
else
    exit 0
fi
 
FULL_PATH="/mnt/storage/YouTube/%(uploader)s [%(channel_id)s]/%(upload_date>%Y%m%d)s - %(uploader)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s"
 
mkdir -p /archives
yt-dlp \
        --output "${FULL_PATH}" \
        --replace-in-metadata "title" "[^\x20\x30-\x39\x40-\x5a\x61-\x7a\x2f\x5c\x5b\x5d]" "" \
        -S "height:480" \
        --username oauth2 --password '' \
        --continue \
        --download-archive "/archives/$0.txt" \
        --write-info-json \
        --write-subs \
        YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_OR_CHANNEL_URL 2>&1 | logger

where:

YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_OR_CHANNEL_URL is a placeholder for the YouTube channel or playlist

The result is that when Plex Media Server is made to scan the folder using the plugins above, with the settings:

Select type→TV Shows,
Advanced→Scanner→Absolute Series Scanner,
Advanced→Agent→YouTubeSeries
Advanced→Seasons→Show

as pictured in the screenshot below:

Scanner and Agent	Season Folders

then browsing the folder will result in all videos being organized underneath season folders labeled by year.