I'm new to the world of open source development, at least as an author. This is mostly because it has always felt like whatever tool I need, someone has already made it. It makes it seem like any tool I can think of is an internet search away, be it for my professional needs or my personal hobbies.
This notion was challenged last year when I was looking for a good tool to backup my favorite YouTube videos and playlists locally, on a better level than simply downloading video files. In a way, I was right. There are definitely options for what I wanted, but in different extremes.
One side was the self-hosted tools that could completely set up a containerized VM in your own machine or self-hosted setup, where you can save anything you want. Now, I'm someone who cares deeply about preservation of art and expression, but I don't have the resources to set up a whole self-hosted stack, and doing the whole rigamarole of setting it up on my personal computer feels like hammering a nail with a mallet.
The other side of the spectrum was fully local options that sometimes had more or fewer features: downloading subtitles, different language audio tracks, queuing downloads, embedding metadata, and more. But all were still falling short of what I was really looking for. What I really needed was solving an issue I've had with YouTube for years.
