1st-Rodeo

I wanted to find out a way to download cartoons from my childhood I liked so they could be archived and potentially edited. During one of my rabbit hole sessions I had stumbled across a "secret app store" called Homebrew which lead me to yt-dlp and ffmpeg. This was the first time I had ever heard of any of this.

One thing led to another and I ended up writing a bash script to automate a whole pipeline. Outside of installing Linux, this was the first time I'd ever actually done something with code. That's partly why it's called 1st-Rodeo.

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What It Does

Downloads video from any YouTube URL or playlist, then normalizes the output so your files are clean and edit-ready. Two steps, one command.

• Pulls best available quality via yt-dlp, merges to .mp4
• Re-encodes with ffmpeg for consistent codec, bitrate, and web-ready output
• Skips files already processed so re-runs don't duplicate work
• Keeps a download archive so you never pull the same video twice
• Exits cleanly on errors instead of silently continuing

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Requirements

• yt-dlp
• ffmpeg

macOS:

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

Linux:

sudo apt install ffmpeg
pip install yt-dlp

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Usage

chmod +x 1st-rodeo.sh
./1st-rodeo.sh "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUR_VIDEO_ID"

Playlist:

./1st-rodeo.sh "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=YOUR_PLAYLIST_ID"

Output:

• Raw downloads → ~/1st-Rodeo/downloads/
• Processed files → ~/1st-Rodeo/output/
• Archive log → ~/1st-Rodeo/archive.txt

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Encoding Defaults

-crf 20               # Quality (lower = better, larger file)
-preset veryfast      # Speed vs compression tradeoff
-b:a 160k             # Audio bitrate
-movflags +faststart  # Web-optimized playback

Adjust these in the script to match your workflow.

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What's Next

This is v1.1 — a lean pipeline. Where I want to take it:

• Silence detection to identify natural cut points
• Timestamp mapping for high-retention segment extraction
• --mode flags: download, process, analyze
• Parallelized processing for large batches

When those pieces come together this becomes less of a script and more of a content extraction engine. Not there yet.

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Notes

• Built and tested on macOS. Works on Linux. Windows needs WSL or Git Bash.
• Only use this for content you have the rights to download.
• This was built for my own workflow. It works. It's not polished. Use accordingly.

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Built by Evan-Jordan
github.com/iamevanjordan