Category: Computing

Downloading YouTube Favourites with yt-dlp (a youtube-dl Fork)

Someone might really want to keep their favourite YouTube videos forever. For this, said someone might use a youtube-dl fork called yt-dlp. In this fictional scenario imagine that “I” employ this method of downloading YouTube videos.

Like the original it has lots of options and as of the writing of this post it gets regular updates. To get it all working on macOS the installation is easy enough using homebrew: brew install yt-dlp. You will also need ffmpeg installed.

The real difficulty was trying to figure out how to get the best video and audio in a format that ist compatible on basically all my devices and – most importantly – my Plex server.

Without going into the discovery process, which involved some trial and error (being a lame script kiddie in that regard…) I found what works best for my use case. So, without any further delay, this is what I use:

yt-dlp -v --merge-output-format "mp4/mkv" -o "/Volumes/Mediathek/youtube-dl/YT-Fav-Archive/%(upload_date)s - %(release_date)s - %(channel)s - %(title)s - %(id)s.%(ext)s" -i -f 'bestvideo+bestaudio' --download-archive /Volumes/Mediathek/youtube-dl/YT-Fav-Archive/archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=[PLAYLIST ID]"
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Word to PDF Batch Conversion

I needed to convert a bunch of Word files to pdf. I found this visual basic code that basically opens all files one after another in Word and saves a pdf version.

'Convert .doc or .docx to .pdf files via Send To menu
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
For i= 0 To WScript.Arguments.Count -1
   docPath = WScript.Arguments(i)
   docPath = fso.GetAbsolutePathName(docPath)
   If LCase(Right(docPath, 4)) = ".doc" Or LCase(Right(docPath, 5)) = ".docx" Then
      Set objWord = CreateObject("Word.Application")
      pdfPath = fso.GetParentFolderName(docPath) & "\" & _
	fso.GetBaseName(docpath) & ".pdf"
      objWord.Visible = False
      Set objDoc = objWord.documents.open(docPath)
      objDoc.saveas pdfPath, 17
      objDoc.Close
      objWord.Quit   
   End If   
Next
vbs file

Just save it as a vbs somewhere and add a ahortcut to the context menu.

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo
Context Menu Entry

You can select multiple files at once and they get converted one by one.

Simple manual Backup with robocopy

I wanted to have a “simple” solution for an (external) backup of my USB stick. The simplest way would be copy and paste, but I wanted something more robust. So what gets you robust copying of files in Windows? Robust File Copy – robocopy –, of course.

I use this manually, but for internal or permanently attached drives etc. this could be automated with task planning and removing the user promts.

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