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 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.
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.
It’s TF1 (one), not TFI :crying:
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.
Wow, a Koh-Lanta reference outside of r/survivor. Not something I expected.
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
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!<
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.
it’s just such a shame that yt liked playlist got completely privated some years ago so you can’t automatically download everything
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.
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!
Indeed, so many videos I took for granted disappeared later. Max the storage, max the network speed… hoard everything!
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 :)
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.
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 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!