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!
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.
We need a torrent site just for these.
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
you can setup a cron job to run yt-dlp with a link to your “liked videos” playlist periodically
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.
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’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 (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!
Sigh, I used to. But have run out of storage space. I’m feeling very anxious.
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.
I’ve been having a helluva time finding Sesame Street episodes from the 70s.