Self-hosted media utility

YouTube Buffer App

A local web app that searches YouTube, starts yt-dlp in the background, buffers the video to disk, plays it from the local cache and can delete it after playback.

Download source Setup instructions

What it does

Search YouTube or paste a YouTube URL.
Click a result to start a server-side yt-dlp buffer job.
Play the video from the local cache while the download continues.
Optionally delete cached video files automatically after playback.
Use local YouTube cookies for private areas such as Watch Later and Liked Videos.

Important: This app cannot run as a pure static Cloudflare Pages app because browsers cannot execute yt-dlp or write a video cache on the server. It is intended for local use, a home server, NAS, VPS or Docker host.

Setup

Download and extract the source archive, then run:

cd youtube-buffer-webapp
npm install
python3 -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -U yt-dlp
npm start

Open http://localhost:3787 in your browser.

Optional environment variables:

PORT=8080 YTDLP=/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp COOKIE_FILE=/path/cookies.txt AUTO_DELETE_DEFAULT=true npm start

YouTube login / Watch Later

The app does not ask for your Google password. Instead, it can use a local Netscape-format cookies.txt file exported from your already logged-in browser. The cookies stay on the server where you run the app.

Log in to YouTube in your normal browser.
Export YouTube cookies as cookies.txt, for example with a local cookies export extension.
Paste them into the app under “YouTube Login”.
Use “Watch Later” or “Liked Videos” inside the local app.

Legal and privacy notes

This utility is provided as source code for personal, self-hosted use. Respect YouTube’s terms, creator rights and applicable law. Do not share private cookies, cached files or downloaded media publicly.