An Anagnorisis module that treats YouTube purely as a video CDN (content delivery network) - it creates a lean local representation of each video you care about and hands all search, ranking, and recommendations over to Anagnorisis's own algorithms. No YouTube homepage, no autoplay rabbit-holes, no engagement-maximising suggestions.

This can be especially useful if you want to build a safe, distraction-free zone for a child, only the videos you explicitly add are visible, ordered by your own criteria. Or use it yourself to break bad watching habits and build a curated library of content that actually matters to you.

You add videos or entire channels. The module fetches metadata (title, channel, description, tags, duration, thumbnail) from YouTube and stores it locally as a small .link file. The video itself is never downloaded — it is streamed on demand directly from YouTube's CDN when you press play, at the quality you choose. Everything else — searching, sorting, recommendations, ratings — runs locally without any input from YouTube.

Each video is stored as a set of files inside the configured storage directory:

<storage_directory>/
  <channel-name>/
    .channel.yaml          # channel ID, URL, last sync timestamp
    <youtube-id>.link      # YAML front-matter: title, author, duration, publish date, URL
    <youtube-id>.link.meta # plain-text metadata for semantic search (description, tags)
    <youtube-id>.link.preview.png  # thumbnail image

Videos stream through a server-side proxy that forwards HTTP Range requests to YouTube's CDN, so seeking, duration display, and speed-control browser extensions all work correctly. Quality can be changed while a video is playing (360p – 4K). Because YouTube caps pre-muxed progressive streams at around 720p for most videos, selecting 1080p or higher will deliver the best pre-muxed quality available.

Some videos require you to be signed in to YouTube. To sing-in you need to provide the cookies.txt file generated in Netscape format while signed in to YouTube. After providing the file, it is gonna be stored locally as cookies.txt inside the storage directory.