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!
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
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!
Does anyone know if there is a similar tool for tiktok?
Yet another vote for https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist I’ve been using it for several months and it’s fantastic.
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI.
Care to share ? :D
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.
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!
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…
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.)
Removing content and not archiving it for others to use in the future is a war crime
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?
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??? :)
Of course I can … lol. I’ll upload it asap. Give me 1-2 days.
edit: It was 4k upscaled
Was it the circus song?
Not just Circus, but pretty much every single clip of hers
Will you share with the whole class?
RemindMe! 1 day
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.
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!
it’s just such a shame that yt liked playlist got completely privated some years ago so you can’t automatically download everything
Way too much stuff is disappearing these days, my archive has over 200k videos that have been removed from YouTube
That’s impressive. Only ones that has been removed, or in total?
Just the removed ones, the total’s over a million
How do you find out a video is gone from YT at that scale?
Impressive. Can we access it, or is it a personal archive?
It’s infeasible to host the entire archive publicly the way it’s setup, but I put removed stuff people request on hobune.stream
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.
Mostly just the fact that there’s so much culture and history out there and it’s all disappearing (or worse, being modified and replaced) in front of our eyes. If I don’t save it, nobody else will.
So it’s kinda like you feel like data preservation is your calling, so to speak. That’s quite admirable.
I can think of several instances where archivists saved the day. Most notably when the BBC lost loads of episodes of Doctor Who, and thankfully, some fans had them recorded on VHS and were able to send them in.
It’s similar to the story about a lady that spent 24 hours a day recording live stuff to VHS from tv channels in the 80’s onwards. Turns out a lot of it was never saved by the broadcasters. She had some of it on literally thousands of tapes. Apparently she had like 6 recordings going on in parallell, all the time. Spending a lot of her time switching out tapes…
I guess you could call her an analogue horder? :)
She’s my hero.
That’s bad ass man, respect
or me casualty saving music I like into a playlist, revisitng it a year later
“57 tracks that are no longer available are hidden”
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.
Thanks！！that’s really a handy tool I will share it with my wife!
And the grown up version of that is /r/tubearchivist (it also includes a plugin to sync to Jellyfin).
ytdl-sub author here, I kindly disagree calling it a child’s version of TA 🙂 Minus the elastic-search/player, its scraping features I think are a superset of TA while being incredibly lightweight (at the cost of being a CLI tool).
I too am a connoisseur of music vids and concerts, it’s actually one of the main reasons I built ytdl-sub. Feel free to ping me with any questions - happy to help
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.
It was magic tricks for me :/
This.
I learned that back in the days of “this video is not available in your country because Sony/BMG/GEMA/whoever said so.”
Indeed, so many videos I took for granted disappeared later. Max the storage, max the network speed… hoard everything!
Sigh, I used to. But have run out of storage space. I’m feeling very anxious.
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.