Always, always archive youtube videos you want to watch later...
Always, always archive youtube videos you want to watch later...
Example 1:
Right during the pandemic, TFI (French TV) put up all past seasons of its show 'Star Academy'. It was something I have been trying to get hold of but did not have any luck. As soon as it popped I thought I got it all. (2 years ago). Today I found out I was missing the first season (8 in total) and went to try to grab it. ALL seasons have now been removed. I am quite pissed at it!
Example 2:
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI. The results were mind blowing. I grabbed all the videos I could (official ones are 480p/720 p max limited). Less than 1 week later, the content was gone....forever.
Example 3: (Non YT)
Not YT. Koh Lanta (French equivalent of Survivor) is aired on french TV (TFI again). As soon as the season is over, they take it down. You are unable to rewatch/watch it if you missed the air/stream time. ALL past seasons are also not available and that spans to about 20+ years of contents and 30+seasons. Same applies to US Survivor but to a lesser extent. And you need to keep paying to 'stream' it.
Conclusion:
Always archive media you want to rewatch/collect. Streaming is not your friend. It is just another way of controlling content distribution, tying you up to the 'subscription' slavery model instead of owning your contents and worse, down the line downright CENSORING or MODIFYING contents to fit whatever garbage narrative is currently en vogue.
Stay focused brothers!
Sigh, I used to. But have run out of storage space. I'm feeling very anxious.
This is something I have been able to work much better on thanks to TheFrenchGhosty's Ultimate YouTube-DL Scripts Collection. It's easy to download, but hard to curate and sort as I would like playlists to be in numerical order, but it doesn't scale well if a new video is added or an order is swapped. Best stick to iso date format as that is some form of an order. I may make some tweaks to them such as better sponsorblock support and just for archival use only.
I did analysis of my liked videos, based on Google Takeout and 10% of my liked videos are gone.
On the other side I would not watch them again anyways. I just backup important stuff.
Indeed, so many videos I took for granted disappeared later. Max the storage, max the network speed... hoard everything!
it's just such a shame that yt liked playlist got completely privated some years ago so you can't automatically download everything
They say there’s a server with everything on it. I don’t know if it’s true but I hear a lot about google just hoarding everything. I assume most of the big companies have offset archives in storage for that later day. They keep them private for reasons. Unlocking them takes skill, guidance, and friendships. You won’t get into any of those rich peoples servers without some clean tea bargaining that’s for sure. S as though some of us are crazy enough to just convince them to open up the whole thing in just a few sweet ledgers of conversation. Call it human instinct. But it’s true. We’re all just people on this world. If the ends meet, well, maybe we’ll just get all that data we’ve been asking for and get to have a drunken party afterwards! Ya know? Anyways…good luck!
I (finally!) installed Tube Archivist last week and went through my library of already archived YT videos and saved them manually in TA (it’s the easiest way if you haven’t saved the metadata to go with the video, which I hadn’t for the oldest videos). Out of almost 1000 videos over five years or so, maybe 5% have gone private or is gone from YT. And it was mostly videos I really wanted to keep. Now comes the dirty work of trying to find the metadata for those missing videos since I do have them locally. I have done some research around how to do it, but if anyone has actually figured it out it would be nice to know!
I've set up "Tube Archivist" and don't regret it whatsoever. Automatically scans my playlists or channels I add at the times I set the cron to. It's still somewhat in early development and the cookie-parsing doesn't work half the time for me sadly, tho I seem to be one of just a few cases who have this issue.
It's a game-changer when it comes to archiving :) It even saves subtitles, comments and SponsorBlock timestamps.
I did as well last week. And I am in love. I’m still conservative on what I download and specifically what I subcribe to. But the process is now sooooo much easier compared to the manual labour I did before (and have for five years). Maybe my top docker app install this year!
Yet another vote for https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist I've been using it for several months and it's fantastic.
Does anyone know if there is a similar tool for tiktok?
I basically throw every YT video I watch into TubeArchivist. The browser extension makes this a single click. Currently have over 5TB of YT videos saved, including whole channels.
Way too much stuff is disappearing these days, my archive has over 200k videos that have been removed from YouTube
What prompts you to archive this stuff? I'm a YouTuber and while I do have my own archives, I don't want to archive it for me, I want that data to be available for years, decades, perhaps centuries to come.
Like what if YT goes for some reason. What's essentially my current, most important job is all there. If it goes, the last 5 years of my life are effectively deleted.
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI.
Care to share ? :D
I learned this one the hard way. I am an NBA fan and YouTube used to be a bastion of full games from 80 - early 2000s.
I started archiving, but then the Last Dance happened and the NBA scrubbed the Internet of all old full games.
I got half way through backing up all the 90s bulls championships before the purge and it still bugs me.
It’s annoying when you know they where there at some point and you just never got to them. At least they actually published som classic games on YT during the pandemic and most (all?) of them are still there. I have archived them of course :)
I have 10-12 channels I back up. I have a windows task schedule to run YT-DLP every 12 hours on each channel and they are spaced out as much as I can so there is as little overlap as possible and the ones that do are the ones that done update regularly.
Sooner or later all these streaming first movies and shows that had zero physical release will start to go missing or in limbo when these companies go under and people will wonder where they can find them.
I know a lot of the shows I enjoy watching on netflix will be gone someday unless I start backing them up now.
They already do. https://movieweb.com/bryan-cranston-on-the-one-and-only-ivan/
That’s why I pay for some streaming services but never actually use them to watch shows. If you know what I mean? ;)
If a show you like is still running, might not hurt to "watch" the show in the background to ensure additional seasons get made.
Wow, a Koh-Lanta reference outside of r/survivor. Not something I expected.
My thing is I just want something to watch my personal playlists/ favorites and save them so I never have that "this video was removed" problem again.
However, I don't know what can do it. I tried TubeArchivist and another one using their Docker containers in my Unraid server but it doesn't really do what I'm trying.
It's TF1 (one), not TFI :crying:
This is why I save all music/audiobooks/etc. In flac from deezer. Its so fucked up if theres something coming to mind which you want so Bad after remembering it just to Disco ver its gone.
Ahhh the good ole' days of a studio producing all the season's on DVD content and manufacturing it en mass. What a time!
I've done similarly, RedLetterMedia, some of my fav streamers and long plays, Gaki no Tsukai - and recently DnD streams. If I'm on my PC at least, I play the videos straight from youtube as a means of support to the channels, but any other time? I've got my copies on a loop.
Had been using Tartube and I never delved deep into youtube-dl cmd prompts. Recently it seems to have issue downloading the highest available quality, but I'm beginning to not care as much most of the time, I just rip it to a lo bit rate mp3 to listen to when I'm driving, cooking, w/e. Most of the time, the content I have is very conducive to just audio only.
Tu sauvegarde la Star Académie !!! Mais honte à toi ! C'est déjà assez dur comme ça, même sans TV d'essayer d'y échapper, aux pubs en ville, et leurs reprises de merdes à la radio... Et toi tu sauvegarde ça sur ton setup de geek ! Mais vas marcher sur des Lego !!!! C'est dingue ça !!!
Bon OK Koh Lanta, je peux comprendre, entre les aventuriers toujours plus dingues à chaque saison et les changements de règles toujours inattendus de Denis, ça reste ce qu'il y a de mieux sur TF1.
Mais bordel, la Star Ac....
J'ai 31 ans, déjà quand l'autre grognasse Bretonne de Nolwenn Leroy a gagné j'en avais déjà marre (saison 3 je crois ?), j'avais 12 ans à l'époque.
S'il te plaît OP, laisse donc cette merde mourir dans les oubliettes de TF1. Puisse qu'aucun archéologue dans le futur, tomber sur cette daube et prétendre que "c'était la musique populaire en ce temps là".
Si tu veux sauvegarder des émissions ou D ela musique, choisis au moins du contenu audible et de bon goût, s'il te plaît !
Ce qui est « de la merde » pour toi, n’est pas forcément le cas pour tout le monde. Je suis sûr que tu sauves « de la merde » aussi. Ton opinion sur ce qui est audible ou pas on en a absolument rien à branler.
C'est de la nostalgie. J'ai grandi dans la saison 1-4 de la star ac :) Mais chacun ses choix...
I use an automated Downloader to download subscribed videos when they are uploaded to watch at my convience ad free.
What software do you use for this purpose?
yes please let us know how to DL
We need a torrent site just for these.
I actually purchased a copy of '4K Video Downloader' for this very purpose, and previously used Internet Download Manager for many years (I still use IDM as a backup as 4k sometimes can't download videos with particular settings). I was able to save a few pulled videos this way, and have an extensive collection I can look back on. It is a kick to see postage-stamp sized videos of memes I was watching in the mid 2000's. I don't keep everything I download, but I download everything I watch.
On my rack I have a little emblem that says 'Archive Everything' - it's a cute animal looking over a set of folders. I archive what I can.
I've been having a helluva time finding Sesame Street episodes from the 70s.
This submission has been randomly featured in /r/serendipity, a bot-driven subreddit discovery engine. More here: /r/Serendipity/comments/186bl9k/always_always_archive_youtube_videos_you_want_to/
i have (checks drive) about 4 TIB of archived youtube content, there is a non zero chance i have something you want if you like the same stuff i do lol.
Somewhere between 7-14 thousand videos. I havent checked the real number.
It's content i like mostly, with some definite deletions later on. Archived for posterity since if i don't do it nobody else will, even though unlikely to go bunk. It could happen someday :)
A reminder for people in the US who may be concerned, the same time shifting principle from this SCOTUS decision applies to saving streaming content. Simply, if you had legal access to the content at one point in time, you are allowed to time shift by recording and playing back for personal use at another point in time.
!IANAL YMMV!<
you can setup a cron job to run yt-dlp with a link to your "liked videos" playlist periodically
Greetings ye, I still am lamenting the long-ago deletion of that “Ed, Edd, n’ Eddy” video, in which “Nigh of Fire” is synchronized onto the film’s opening vehicle-chase; such was the means that I was formally introduced into Euro’beat. -__-
~Waz
My yt-dlp is running most nights, but I've gotta stop... I'm never going to get around to watching everything.
Could you share the Britney Spears??? :)
yt-dlp
Have you any copy pasta to drop? Most GUI attached to yt-dlp seem to run into hiccups from time to time. My most recent case is it downloading 720p rather than the highest available video.
I think I managed in the past to figure out how to run prompts at some point, but it was a confusing affair for me personally. I like how most GUI allow me to copy a playlist and kinda just forget and let it download.
or me casualty saving music I like into a playlist, revisitng it a year later
"57 tracks that are no longer available are hidden"
Japanese citypop playlists in a nutshell
You can still get them if you use a tool like Snap Downloader. Put the playlist URL into the search and it will show the URL of every video that has been removed. Search each one individually on Wayback Machine and enter the Wayback URL for that video. Works more often than not, but you have to sift through instances sometimes.
I also want to add that you can use an extension that automatically submits pages that you go to on your computer to The Wayback Machine so that, even if it is deleted, you can easily find the artist and song by searching on Wayback Machine. The easiest way to archive it for someone who doesn't have a lot of technical knowledge is to turn the extension on, mute your computer, and then let your entire playlist run on 2x speed (or whatever the fastest is) while you sleep.
Is this the easiest way of backing things up? No. Is it possibly more convenient to download the media for your own collection? Yeah, but if your technical knowledge is limited or if you don't currently have access to a lot of storage space, this could probably be of use.
This.
I learned that back in the days of "this video is not available in your country because Sony/BMG/GEMA/whoever said so."
It was magic tricks for me :/
I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub
It's a tool that watches YouTube channels or playlists, downloads everything, and prepares them so they appear directly in players like Plex, Jellyfin, Kodi etc. Basically the equivalent of the *arr stack for YouTube.
I feel this. Especially if you can’t remember some of the songs or mixes in the list.
A really prolific chill music channel called Quantum Foam Sounds recently bit the dust, taking tons of obscure albums with unique art made by the channel with it. Fortunately the admin of the channel posted about a week earlier about what might be coming down the line, and I grabbed all the ones that were important to me (like, seriously, some of them have become things I HAVE to listen to at least once a week.)
Glad you were able to back up your favorites, sounds like it was a cool channel. Sad to hear about stuff like this after it was gone.
Have you shared these on the Internet Archive or elsewhere?
Removing content and not archiving it for others to use in the future is a war crime
Amen to this.
You can import Youtube playlists into Jdownloader and download for example your "Liked Videos". You can also use "Google Takeout" to export all you files, playlists and history to CSV.
You can import Youtube playlists into Jdownloader and download for example your "Liked Videos". You can also use "Google Takeout" to export all you files, playlists and history to CSV.
Yes, I use playlist in JDL. I just archived 5 french sitcoms totalling about 90-100GB of space from YT. I'm sure they will take it out at some point as it is still being played by AB channels..