ta-helper

Python script to post process Tube Archivist products, generate human readable folders and files, support NFO files and new per video notifications using apprise library. Various functions can be enabled/disabled. Nothing is touched in your Tube Archivist media folders. The image below shows your original obfuscated naming on the left and new, human readable folders on the right.

Here is how your NFO file supporting media manager (Kodi, Emby, Jellyfin etc.) can look after you add your new YouTube videos folder:

Using It

Copy .example-env to .env in the same folder as the script and edit to put in your own settings. .example-env has detailed comments that explain how to use each setting.

What exactly does it do?

It iterates through the Tube Archivist video folders and does several things:

1. Creates a mirror set of folders via symbolic links with the actual channel names and video titles for human readability.
2. If GENERATE_NFO is set to "True" it will generate .nfo files for each new channel and/or video which allows media managers such as Kodi, Emby, Jellyfin etc. to show meta info.
3. If TA_CACHE is not "" it can generate symbolic links to subtitles, poster, cover and banner jpg's inside TA cache for media managers.
4. If NOTIFICATIONS_ENABLED is set to "True" in your .env, apprise will be used to notify of new videos using the apprise URL you provide, also in .env, based off the apprise documentation. Here i san example of an apprise link to send notification via Gmail: "mailto://:@gmail.com"
5. If CLEANUP_DELETED_VIDEOS is set to "True" any broken symlinks or hanging nfo files (nfo file with no corresponding video) will be deleted from TARGET_FOLDER. So if TA is configured to delete watched videos, this will clean-up any leftovers.

NOTE: When apprise is setup to send emails via gmail, each notification takes approx 3s on a Raspberry Pi4. So if you are doing an initial run on a large library, temporarily setting NOTIFICATIONS_ENABLED to "False" will save a lot of time.

Triggering ta-helper to run:

To kickstart the ta-helper when TA adds new videos to the archive we have 3 options:

1. Manually run the script when you know new videos have been added via "python ta-helper.py"

2. Use a cron job to periodically run the script, say every half an hour. Using crontab -e to add a cron job. This would trigger it every 30 minutes: 30 * * * * python /home/me/projects/ta-helper/ta-helper.py

3. Use apprise notifications from TA server as event driven triggers to run the script only when needed. More efficient than cron polling described in (2) above. We use apprise via the Settings page. Under "Start Download" set the apprise notification URL to "json://<IP/Hostname>:/ta-helper-trigger". For example I use: "json://192.168.1.11:8001/ta-helper-trigger". NOTE: Remove the quotes before copying into TA settings. To process these notifications and trigger the script, simply run "python ta-helper-trigger.py" on the machine where your TA archive is. Make sure the PORT value in ta-helper-trigger.py matches the PORT you used in the TA apprise link mentioned above. I added the following line (without quotes) as a cron job (using crontab -e): "@reboot python /home/me/projects/ta-helper/ta-helper-trigger.py > /home/me/Desktop/ta-trigger.log". Change these paths to match your own config.

Most up to date version of script can be found on GitHub, here.

Script originally created by user GordonFreeman on the Tube Archivist discord server.