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Hi everyone,

I’ve started building an Arr companion called Youtubarr, mainly because I kept hitting the same problem: older shows and episodes that I couldn’t find through torrents or NZBs, but could sometimes find on YouTube.

I wanted a way to bring those into my existing media library without manually downloading, renaming and organising everything—or filling my server with more video files.

After starting, I realised there were already projects called yt2radarr and Youtubarr. Clearly, checking whether the name was taken should have happened earlier 😂

Having looked into them, there’s some overlap, but they tackle different jobs:

• yt2radarr downloads videos and organises them into your library, primarily through Radarr, with some Sonarr integration. It also supports things like subtitles and playlist downloads.
• DireDireCrocs’ Youtubarr connects YouTube/YouTube Music playlists to Lidarr through import lists, helping turn your playlists into music discovery and library management.

Credit to both projects. What I’m building takes a different direction: using YouTube as another source for missing movies, episodes and eventually music, with playback on demand and no permanent full video download by default.

The workflow I’m working towards is:

1. Use your existing Sonarr/Radarr wanted items and metadata to search YouTube.
2. Match results using titles, episode numbers, runtime and other details, filtering out trailers, reactions and random clips.
3. Present results through familiar Arr search and queue workflows.
4. Expose the selected media in your normal library structure.
5. Resolve and stream the YouTube source when you press play.

The main technical goal is a virtual filesystem with real symlinks: your library points to virtual media files that serve the content on demand. There’s also a planned .strm fallback and an optional normal download mode for anything you actually want to keep.

For my use case, the advantages are less permanent storage, less manual handling, and a workflow centred on the missing episode or film I’m looking for. I also want matching to explain why it picked a video, so you can spot a bad match before adding it.

It’s very early days. I’ve built the initial foundation, and the workflow above is the direction I’m developing towards—not a claim that everything is already finished. Virtual playback, seeking and reliable Arr imports still need proper end-to-end testing. Jellyfin is the first playback target; Plex, Emby and the wider music functionality are further down the plan.

There’s an obvious trade-off too: streaming depends on the source staying available on YouTube. This won’t replace keeping a local copy of something you want to preserve.

I started this to solve a gap in my own setup, but wondered whether others have the same problem with older or obscure shows.

Would this be useful to you? And what would matter most: finding missing episodes, accurate matching, playlist support, or saving disk space?

Also, given the existing project, I’m open to a better name!