// the find
kieraneglin/pinchflat
Your next YouTube media manager
Pinchflat is a self-hosted Elixir app that wraps yt-dlp to download YouTube channels and playlists on a schedule, aimed at people running Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi who want their subscriptions archived to disk automatically. It's a single Docker container with no external DB or dependencies, positioned as a lighter alternative to Tube Archivist or TubeSync.
Genuinely self-contained - one container, embedded SQLite, no Postgres/Redis to stand up, which matters a lot for the homelab crowd it's targeting. The Phoenix LiveView web UI with websockets for real-time download progress is a nicer experience than most yt-dlp wrappers that just show you a log file. It covers the actual pain points of this use case specifically: SponsorBlock integration, Plex/Jellyfin-friendly naming and file layout, cookie-based auth for private playlists, and a documented faster-than-average content-check approach for new uploads. Custom yt-dlp passthrough options and lifecycle scripts give power users an escape hatch instead of boxing them into the UI.
The author's own README carries a stability disclaimer - 'anything can break at any time,' no forward-compatibility guarantees - which is an honest flag but a real risk if you're treating this as an archival tool. SQLite's WAL mode explicitly breaks on network shares (a common NAS/homelab setup), and the workaround (rollback journal mode) is called out as possibly causing data loss on migration. Custom lifecycle scripts (post-download/delete hooks) are marked alpha. No built-in auth beyond basic auth via env vars, so anyone exposing this past their LAN needs to handle that themselves - it's not multi-user or role-based in any way.