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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s bad ass man, respect
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.
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 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 :)
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI.
Care to share ? :D
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.
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.
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.
We need a torrent site just for these.
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
you can setup a cron job to run yt-dlp with a link to your “liked videos” playlist periodically
Wow, a Koh-Lanta reference outside of r/survivor. Not something I expected.