Summary
- MeTube turns youtube-dlp into a web-based UI for easy YouTube video downloads.
- Install MeTube on a NAS with Docker support, like TrueNAS, for local video access.
- Control download format, quality, and storage with MeTube's user-friendly interface.
While you can use a NAS to run your own Netflix, you can also easily use a NAS to pull from YouTube and build up a local collection of YouTube videos downloaded in their best quality. That's thanks to MeTube, a Docker container that turns youtube-dlp into a web-based UI that can download videos and then let you download them to whatever device you're connected to.
All you need is a NAS that supports Docker, and I'm using TrueNAS ón my NAS that I built out of an old PC. MeTube was super easy to set up, and all I needed to do was download and deploy it, and it worked immediately out of the box. It's available in a Docker container for download, or on the TrueNAS application store.
8 incredible projects I completed with just my NAS
A NAS is a gateway into the world of computing, and it can teach you a lot.
Downloading and installing MeTube
It's super easy
On TrueNAS, MeTube is part of the built-in community containers that you can download and install through the App discovery page. When you install it, you don't need to change anything, although you can give it access to a specified storage if you want the files it downloads to go into a certain folder. Otherwise, you can just download it, and it'll be hosted on your NAS and accessible from your web browser.
Once you're in the web panel, you can just paste a YouTube link and choose what format you'd like to download in, what quality, and if you'd like to start downloading it immediately once it scans the link you put. It can then download it with the parameters that you've set, and can then download the file directly from your NAS to your machine.
This is a great way to download YouTube videos, especially given that you can then transfer those files to any of your devices with ease. While there are plenty of apps and websites out there that can do it for you, none of them give you the degree of control MeTube does, aside from running youtube-dlp yourself. And, while you can do that, MeTube is easier than messing around in a command line and makes it so that you can download those files easily no matter what device you're on.
It's a super easy program to get up and running, and I highly recommend checking it out if you have a NAS and are looking for more projects to do!
