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I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Stor
by bdz 10mo ago
I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site.
I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.
- moralestapia 10mo agoSame here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever. I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me. Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it. So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more. And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
- anamexis 10mo ago> And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ... Isn’t that the YouTube Music app?
- moralestapia 10mo agoNo.
- anamexis 10mo agoHow so? What’s missing?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- moralestapia 10mo ago* Several hundred million tracks that are not labeled as "music" by uploaders, to start. * Native integration with my phone music player, allowing for things like seamless playback, etc. * Things I like on YouTube automatically go to my device. * If a track is removed from YouTube, it stays on my device. (Did you take 10 seconds to read my comment above?)
- anamexis 10mo ago* Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music app. * There is a liked videos playlist Yes, I read your comment above. Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.
- moralestapia 10mo agoGreat. I'll keep using mine, though.
- FergusArgyll 10mo agoI have a script that calls out to a small llm artist = llm_call("return the name of the artist based on this title", title) etc. with some stripping of newlines etc. It works well! they can often infer the correct answer even if it's not present in the title
- moralestapia 10mo agoHey ^^, that's a great idea. I wrote all of this stuff pre-LLMs, never occurred to me until now, thanks!
- dylan604 10mo agoI doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.
- blarg1 10mo agoI started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.
- doublerabbit 10mo agoSome of the old YTPs were fantastic. They don't exist now. Generations of talent & creativity just gone.
- ajsnigrutin 10mo agoOr because someone else made them take them off. Or because they were deemed 'too dangerous'. Or worse. Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.
- underlipton 10mo agoThere was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a different title. I can't even remember how it went.
- trallnag 10mo agoDo you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I start to journal, track, or just document something, after some time I notice again and again that most of the value has already been created the moment I finish working on a specific entry. Even with something seemingly very important like medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are recordings of memories involving people close to you
- rob 10mo agoI would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.
- ndriscoll 10mo agoWhether something is worth downloading is a good heuristic for whether it's worth watching in the first place. e.g. university lectures, technical talks, hobby technique tutorials, etc. are something you may want to reference in the future, or you may want to save for your kids in case they're interested in it one day, etc. The latest slop from professional "content creators" that you can't imagine keeping so you can pass it down one day? Not worth your time today either.
- f_devd 10mo agoI have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.
- bdz 10mo agoI actually do! I have a perpetual VLC playlist which plays those videos randomly if I need some background noise.
- 10mo ago
- chrsw 10mo agoAnything you see on the Internet can be gone in a moment. If something is important to you, you must save it to guarantee you want to see it again.
- underlipton 10mo agoThe problem then becomes organizing and resurfacing content, especially when it'll likely be outside the context you originally found it.
- nicman23 10mo agodo you have a cron job or something? i know it is probably trivial but eh
- bdz 10mo agoNo! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly
- ivanjermakov 10mo agoPopular self-hosted solution: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
- trvz 10mo agoYou people always make everything more complicated than necessary. yt-dlp -o '%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s' --cookies-from-browser chrome https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=LL
- hrimfaxi 10mo agoThat does none of the things tubearchivist does, among them: - Subscribe to your favorite YouTube channels - Index and make videos searchable - Play videos - Keep track of viewed and unviewed videos Not to mention having to ssh and copy paste URLs around, instead of visiting a page in my browser.
- bspammer 10mo ago> Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface. If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.
- 10mo ago
- cantor_S_drug 10mo agoYou are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.
- ge96 10mo agoI compulsively take pictures of the sky, same never to be looked at
- bluGill 10mo agoTaking pictures is important to getting better. Be glad that each one doesn't cost $.30 in film like it would have in 1980 - not inflation adjusted (prices from memory so perhaps off a bit). That is just the cost of the film you used, if you want to look at the negative you have development costs, and even more costs to get a print. Today you don't have to worry about costs of a photo and so can take a lot of them without worry will it be good, if it is bad just learn from the mistake and throw it away.
- fragmede 10mo agoBLS says $0.30 is $1.25 today. Each roll was like 30 pictures too (24, but I like round numbers), so like her $30 a roll? https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=.30&year1=198001&year2=202509 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=.30&year1=1980...
- bluGill 10mo agoI'm going from memory, but I recall that both 25 and 36 picture rolls were common and there were some 12 picture rolls. (maybe 15?) And of course there were a number of different sizes - 110, 120, 35mm, disc, each with different sizes and costs. (more film sizes at the professional level as well, but your local drug store had all of the above)
- 10mo ago
- mynameisash 10mo agoI was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.
- bdz 10mo agoArchive.org has it at least, everything from 2009 until 2023. But that's also need to be mirrored because can be taken down https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-archive/Jason%27s%20All-Sumo%20channel/ https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-archive...
- fi-le 10mo agoWhat percentage, in numbers?
- lyfy 10mo agoWasn't expecting to see a fellow sumo hoarder on HN...there's dozens of us, dozens!
- hexagonwin 10mo agohow do you manage the archive? I mean the file hierarchy structures etc. i started archiving youtube videos recently, now saving descriptions and other metadatas too, but simply having them all in one directory doesn't seem to be a good idea.
- politelemon 10mo agoWhat is your storage setup, do you have lots of hard drives, or does this go online somewhere?
- halapro 10mo agoWith more content than we need being produced regularly, do you really need to store everything you've ever watched? I used to be an MP3 and movie hoarder, then somehow I realized it was not worth my time. Now I only hoard my photos and I keep them all on my phone (slash cloud) for me to actually scroll through regularly.
- niutech 10mo agoCan you upload some most interesting deleted YT videos to Web Archive or even Dailymotion, so that they are preserved for the next generation?