ZDF to Plex

This tool downloads a fixed list of freely available shows from ZDF Mediathek and stores them in a directory, correctly named to be picked up by Plex. It wraps yt-dlp to implement the actual downloading.

Optional: If TWILIO_* environment variables are set it sends a SMS notification to the provided number once a new episode is available and was downloaded successfully.

It is supposed to run in a cron job to pick up new episodes, the successful downloads are cached so that we don't re-download them.

Configuration

The following environment variables can be set to modify the behaviour of the tool.

• DEBUG: Print yt-dlp output and other debug messages
• HTTP_PROXY_ADDRESS: A http proxy that is used for the download. Example: username:password@10.0.0.1:10000
• ENTRYPOINTS: Comma separated list of shows listed on the ZDF Mediathek website
• YTDL_BIN: Path to the yt-dlp binary on your system. Run which yt-dlp after installing to see where it's located.
• CACHE_PATH: Path where to store the cache directory containing a list of URLs that were already downloaded.
• OUTPUT_BASE_PATH: Path where the downloaded show will be stored. A directory containing the show name will be created if it doesn't exist at the base path.
• TWILIO_SUBACCOUNT_ID: The Twilio account ID
• TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN: The Twilio auth token
• TWILIO_FROM_NUMBER: The phone number SMS notifications from Twilio are sent from
• TWILIO_TO_NUMBER: The phone number SMS notifications from Twilio are sent to

Usage

DEBUG=TRUE HTTP_PROXY_ADDRESS=username:password@10.0.0.1:10000 ENTRYPOINTS=https://www.zdf.de/serien/inspector-barnaby YTDL_BIN=/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp CACHE_PATH=zdf_to_plex.cache OUTPUT_BASE_PATH=/home/ubuntu/media/TV-Misc ./zdf-to-plex-amd64-linux

Usage in Cron

Run hourly and lock if there's already one instance running.

0 */1 * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /home/ubuntu/services/zdf-to-plex/cron.lockfile /home/ubuntu/services/zdf-to-plex/run-zdf-to-plex.sh >> /home/ubuntu/services/zdf-to-plex/zdf-to-plex.log 2>&1

Development

• Set up environment variables in develop.env
• Run ./run_develop.sh to run the tool with default environment variables